The Routledge Companion to New Cinema History 2018046085, 2018059875, 9781315666051, 9781138955844

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The Routledge Companion to New Cinema History

The Routledge Companion to New Cinema History presents the most recent approaches and methods in the study of the social experience of cinema, from its origins in vaudeville and traveling exhibitions to the multiplexes of today. Exploring its history from the perspective of the cinemagoer, the study of new cinema history examines the circulation and consumption of cinema, the political and legal structures that underpinned its activities, the place that it occupied in the lives of its audiences and the traces that it left in their memories. Using a broad range of methods from the statistical analyses of box office economics to ethnography, oral history, and memory studies, this approach has brought about an undisputable change in how we study cinema, and the questions we ask about its history. This companion examines the place, space, and practices of film exhibition and programming; the questions of gender and ethnicity within the cinematic experience; and the ways in which audiences gave meaning to cinemagoing practices, specific films, stars, and venues, and its operation as a site of social and cultural exchange from Detroit and ­Laredo to Bandung and Chennai. Contributors demonstrate how the digitization of source materials and the use of digital research tools have enabled them to map previously unexplored aspects of cinema’s business and social history and undertake comparative analysis of the diversity of the social experience of cinema across regional, national, and continental boundaries. With contributions from leading scholars in the field, The Routledge Companion to New Cinema History enlarges and refines our understanding of cinema’s place in the social history of the twentieth century. Daniel Biltereyst is Professor in Film and Media Studies at Ghent University, Belgium, where he is also Director of the Centre for Cinema and Media Studies (CIMS). His work deals with issues of media historiography, media controversy, and audience’s media engagements. Richard Maltby is Matthew Flinders Distinguished Professor of Screen Studies at Flinders University, South Australia. A Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities, he has published extensively on the cultural history of Hollywood, and has edited seven books on the history of cinema audiences, exhibition, and reception.

Philippe Meers is Professor in Film and Media Studies at the University of Antwerp, ­Belgium, where he chairs the Center for Mexican Studies and is Deputy Director of the ­Visual and Digital Cultures Research Center (ViDi). He has published widely on historical and contemporary film culture and audiences.

The Routledge Companion to New Cinema History

Edited by Daniel Biltereyst, Richard Maltby, and Philippe Meers

First published 2019 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2019 selection and editorial matter Daniel Biltereyst, Richard Maltby, and Philippe Meers; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Daniel Biltereyst, Richard Maltby, and Philippe Meers to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Biltereyst, Daniel, 1962- editor. | Maltby, Richard, 1952– editor. | Meers, Philippe, editor. Title: The Routledge companion to new cinema history / edited by Daniel Biltereyst, Richard Maltby, and Philippe Meers. Description: London; New York, NY: Routledge, 2019. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2018046085 (print) | LCCN 2018059875 (ebook) | ISBN 9781315666051 (ebook) | ISBN 9781138955844 (hardback: alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: Motion pictures. | Motion picture industry. Classification: LCC PN1995 (ebook) | LCC PN1995 .R6854 2019 (print) | DDC 791.4309—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018046085 ISBN: 978-1-138-95584-4 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-315-66605-1 (ebk) Typeset in Bembo by codeMantra

In memory of Karel Dibbets (1947–2017)

Contents

List of figures xi List of tables xiii List of contributors xv Acknowledgments xxiii Introduction: the scope of new cinema history 1 Daniel Biltereyst, Richard Maltby, and Philippe Meers PART I

Reflections and comments 13 Introduction

13

1 Connections, intermediality, and the anti-archive: a conversation with Robert C. Allen 16 Richard Maltby and Philippe Meers 2 Film history, cultural memory, and the experience of cinema: a conversation with Annette Kuhn 28 Daniel Biltereyst 3 How I became a new cinema historian 39 Melvyn Stokes 4 The subject of history and the clutter of phenomena 46 John Caughie

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5 The new nontheatrical cinema history? 55 Gregory A. Waller Part II

Challenges and opportunities 65 Introduction

65

6 Reading newspapers and writing American silent cinema history 68 Richard Abel 7 Arclights and zoom lenses: searching for influential exhibitors in film history’s big data 83 Eric Hoyt 8 Comparing historical cinema cultures: reflections on new cinema history and comparison with a cross-national case study on Antwerp and Rotterdam 96 Daniel Biltereyst, Thunnis van Oort, and Philippe Meers 9 The archeology of itinerant film exhibition: unpacking the Brinton Entertainment Company Collection 112 Kathryn Fuller-Seeley 10 Cinema history as social history: retrospect and prospect 123 Judith Thissen Part III

Distribution and trade 135 Introduction

135

11 Early film stars in trade journals and newspapers: data-based research on global distribution and local exhibition 138 Martin Loiperdinger 12 The high stakes conflict between the Motion Picture Export Association and the Netherlands Cinema Association, 1945–1946 147 Clara Pafort-Overduin and Douglas Gomery 13 “Perhaps everyone has forgotten just how pictures are shown to the public”: continuous performance and double billing in the 1930s 159 Richard Maltby viii

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14 “When in doubt, Showcase”: the rise and fall of United Artists’ revolutionary New York distribution pattern 173 Zoë Wallin 15 When distributors’ trash becomes exhibitors’ treasure: rethinking film success and failure 187 Dean Brandum, Bronwyn Coate, and Deb Verhoeven Part IV

Exhibition, space, and place 199 Introduction

199

16 Roll the credits: gender, geography, and the people’s history of cinema 202 Jeffrey Klenotic 17 Three moments of cinema exhibition 217 Mike Walsh, Richard Maltby, and Dylan Walker 18 Currents of empire: transport, electricity, and early film exhibition in colonial Indonesia 232 Dafna Ruppin 19 Remembering the first movie theaters and early cinema exhibition in Quay, Smyrna, Turkey 244 Dilek Kaya 20 Exhibiting films in a predominantly Mexican American market: the case of Laredo, Texas, a small USA–Mexico border town, 1896–1960 254 José Carlos Lozano Part V

Programming, popularity, and film 269 Introduction

269

21 Popular filmgoing in mid-1950s Milan: opening up the “black box” 271 John Sedgwick and Marina Nicoli 22 Distribution and exhibition in Warner Bros. Philadelphia Theatres, 1935–1936 287 Catherine Jurca ix

Contents

23 To be continued…: seriality, cyclicality, and the new cinema history 296 Tim Snelson 24 Kino-barons and noble minds: specifics of film exhibition beyond commercial entertainment 305 Lucie Česálková 25 When the history of moviegoing is a history of movie watching, then what about the films? 319 Frank Kessler and Sabine Lenk 26 The evergreens and mayflies of film history: the age distribution of films in exhibition 329 Karel Dibbets PART VI

Audiences, reception, and cinemagoing experiences 341 Introduction

341

27 Analyzing memories through video-interviews: a case study of post-war Italian cinemagoing 344 Daniela Treveri Gennari, Silvia Dibeltulo, Danielle Hipkins, and Catherine O’Rawe 28 Social sense and embodied sensibility: towards a historical phenomenology of filmgoing 355 Stephen Putnam Hughes 29 “It Pays to Plan ’em!”: the newspaper movie directory and the paternal logic of mass consumption 365 Paul S. Moore 30 Why young people still go to the movies: historical and contemporary cinemagoing audiences in Belgium 378 Lies Van de Vijver 31 For many but not for all: Italian film history and the circumstantial value of audience studies 387 Mariagrazia Fanchi Index 395

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Figures

5.1 Brochure for Bakersfield First Methodist Episcopal Church, circa 1915. The Sunday School Assembly Hall served as the screening site 58 6.1 Cleveland Plain Dealer 71 6.2 Detroit Sunday Free Press 73 6.3 Washington Theater advertisement, Detroit Sunday Free Press 74 6.4 Majestic Theater advertisement, Detroit Sunday Free Press 75 6.5 Cleveland Sunday Plain Dealer 76 6.6 Detroit Free Press 77 7.1 Arclight graph comparing the number of MHDL pages featuring the names of four exhibitors – Marcus Loew, B.S. Moss, Sydney S. Cohen, and Fred Meyer – over the period of 1910–1930 85 7.2 Pathé advertisement featuring a map of prominent Broadway theaters 90 7.3 The portraits of four members of the “Herald Only” Club, including Fred S. Meyer and Philip Rand 93 8.1 Number of screens per 1,000 inhabitants in Belgium and the Netherlands 102 8.2 Average annual cinema attendance per capita in Belgium and the Netherlands 103 8.3 Data on the population growth rates between 1948 and 1968 and the opening years of cinemas in Rotterdam and surroundings 106 8.4 Data on the population growth rates between 1947 and 1971 and the opening years of cinemas in Antwerp and surroundings 107 9.1 Brinton Entertainment Company datebook 1904–1908 114 10.1 Postcard Saint-Benin-des-Bois, La Place, posted in 1908 127 10.2 Postcard Saint-Benin-des-Bois, posted in 1963 127 10.3 Publicity poster for Boum sur Paris (1953) 131 13.1 Advertisement for Death Takes a Holiday at the Strand Theatre, Sunbury, PA, reproduced in Motion Picture Herald (May 12, 1934, p. 29) 160 13.2 “An Octopus Strangling Quality and Receipts.” Motion Picture Herald (February 13, 1937, p. 70) 166 13.3 Educational Pictures advertisement, Motion Picture Herald (April 2, 1932, p. 45) 169

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Figures

14.1 The typical run-zone-clearance release of Queen Christina (MGM, 1933) 175 14.2 United Artists’ “premiere showcase” plan for The Road to Hong Kong (United Artists, 1962) 177 14.3 Universal’s “perimeter plan” for To Kill a Mockingbird (Universal, 1963) also incorporated a Broadway first run 179 14.4 The wide release of Jaws (Universal, 1975) across North America 183 14.5 The North American release of Central Intelligence (New Line/Universal, 2016) 183 16.1 New Hampshire’s Women Exhibitors, 1896–1950 206 16.2 Emerging Network of women exhibitors, 1917–1920, with gender distribution by county, 1910 207 16.3 Lyric Theatre program card 209 16.4 MPEL convention, 1918 212 17.1 Map of Adelaide first-run cinemas in 1948 219 17.2 Map of suburban cinemas and public transport, 1948 220 17.3 Map of Adelaide drive-in locations, 1965 224 17.4 Map of Wallis cinema multiplex locations 227 18.1 Talbot’s projected tour route of Java 237 24.1 Cinema Passage in Prague (courtesy Brother’s Čvančara Private Archive) 312 24.2 Cinema Metro in Prague (courtesy Brother’s Čvančara Private Archive) 314 26.1 Films with the longest lifespan until 1940 (in years) 332 26.2 Age distribution of old and new films in exhibition in six cities, 1915–1947 334 26.3 Percentage of screen time for films in exhibition in six cities, 1915–1945 337 26.4 Percentage of cinemas showing films over three years old in six cities, 1920–1940 338 27.1 Giorgio’s gaze when remembering James Dean in East of Eden 348 29.1 Cleveland Plain Dealer 366 29.2 Motion Picture News 370 29.3 Cleveland Plain Dealer 371 29.4 Cleveland Plain Dealer 372

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Tables

9.1 Brinton datebook 115 12.1 Number and percentage of movies on the Dutch market by country of origin in the four periods 153 12.2 Share of MPEA members and nonmembers in the total amount of American films on the Dutch market during the four periods of the conflict 153 12.3 Number of new films on the Dutch market 154 12.4 New films and old films from MPEA members 154 12.5 Amount and percentage of new films and old films on the Dutch market before, during, and after the conflict 155 13.1 “Would you rather go to a theater showing one full-length picture, or two full-length pictures?” 168 15.1 Descriptive summary of selected theaters in the Loop District and Near North Side of Chicago from 1 January 1963 to 31 December 1972, including median weekly box office grosses reported in real 2016 US$ price equivalents 192 15.2 Selected descriptive statistics concerning the performance of British films in Chicago by venue tier size, 1963–1967 and 1968–1972 193 15.3 Top ten and bottom ten ranked British films released in Chicago between 1963 and 1972 by aggregate DWA 195 17.1 Drive-ins and population, 1965 223 17.2 Top twenty grossing films for the period from 7 February 2013 to 12 February 2014 228 18.1 Length of railways (kilometer) in Southeast Asia 235 19.1 Early movie theaters in Smyrna (1908–1913) 247 20.1 Laredo, Texas cinemas by year and operators (1907–1960) 256 20.2 Number of films and shows by language exhibited in Laredo, Texas theaters (1952) 260 20.3 Robb & Rowley exhibition circuit in Texas, Oklahoma, and Arkansas by year and cities 262 21.1 Summary statistics describing the characteristics of the different cinema runs in Milan in the mid-1950s 274 xiii

Tables

2 1.2 The twenty most screened films in Milan in January 1954 275 21.3 The distribution of Anni Facile through the cinemas of Milan, 1953–1954 276 21.4 Differences in the number of days between first- and third-run exhibition by the major distributors 277 21.5 Box office Top twenty of films screened in Milan at least once during January 1954 279 21.6 Top twenty audiences by run for those films on release in Milan in January 1954 280 22.1 Characteristics of MGM, Paramount, and Warner Bros. films at the Boyd and Stanley theaters 290 22.2 Characteristics of MGM and Warner Bros. Boyd/Stanley films in second run (among sample theaters) 291 26.1 Film age and screen time in six cities, 1920–1940 336

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Contributors

Richard Abel is Professor Emeritus of International Cinema and Media Studies at the University of Michigan, USA. His most recent books include Encyclopedia of Early Cinema (edited 2005, revised, 2010), Americanizing the Movies and “Movie-Mad” Audiences, 1910–1914 (2006), and Menus for Movie Land: Newspapers and the Emergence of American Film Culture, 1913–1916 (2015). He has curated a series of early western programs for the Giornate del Cinema Muto (Pordenone, Italy), which honored him with the 2017 Jean Mitry Award. Currently he is completing a book manuscript focused on Detroit, Motor City Movie Cultures, 1916–1925 (contracted with Indiana University Press). Robert C. Allen is the James Logan Godfrey Professor of American Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is co-author (with Douglas Gomery) of Film History: Theory and Practice (1985). Over a career of nearly forty years, he has written dozens of book chapters and journal articles on cinema history. He has also explored the use of digital technologies in cinema history. In 2010, he received the Rosenzweig Prize for Innovation in Digital History, given by the American Historical Association. He co-founded and for five years directed the UNC Digital Innovation Lab. He now leads the UNC Community Histories Workshop. Daniel Biltereyst is Professor in Film and Media History and director of the Centre for Cinema and Media Studies (CIMS) at Ghent University, Belgium. Besides exploring new approaches to historical media and cinema cultures, he is engaged in work on film and screen culture as sites of censorship, controversy, public debate and audience engagement. He is the (co-)editor of Explorations in New Cinema History (2011), Cinema, Audiences and Modernity (2012, both with Richard Maltby and Philippe Meers), Silencing Cinema (2013, with Roel Vande Winkel), Moralizing Cinema (2015, with Daniela Treveri Gennari), and a special issue on cinemagoing experiences and memory for Memory Studies (2017, with Annette Kuhn and Philippe Meers). He is working on a book about film magazines (Mapping Movie Magazines, 2019, with Lies Van de Vijver). Dean Brandum  is an independent researcher with a keen interest in the history of film distribution. His PhD, which he gained from Deakin University, Australia, explored the xv

Contributors

concept of the viability of British cinema at the North American box office, 1963–1972. He is the co-editor of Refocus: The Films of Elaine May, which will be published by Edinburgh University Press in 2019. John Caughie  is Emeritus Professor at Glasgow University and an Honorary Research ­ rofessor in Film & Television Studies. He was Principal Investigator on a three-year p­ roject, P Early Cinema in Scotland, 1896–1927, funded by an AHRC Research Grant. His books include Theories of Authorship (editor, 1982), Television Drama: Realism, Modernism and British Culture (2000), a short monograph on Troy Kennedy Martin’s Edge of Darkness (2007), and Early Cinema in Scotland (co-editor, 2018). He has published extensively on both film and television, and was a member of the editorial group of Screen until 2014. Lucie Česálková is Associate Professor at the Department of Film Studies and Audio-visual Culture of Masaryk University in Brno, Czech Republic. She is also head of the National Film Archive’s Research Department in Prague, and chief editor of the Czech peer-reviewed film journal Iluminace. Her research focuses on the history of Czech nonfiction and documentary film (and their educational, promotional or propaganda functions), as well as on the history of film exhibition in the Czech Republic. Bronwyn Coate is Senior Lecturer based in the School of Economics, Finance, and Marketing at RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia, where she co-ordinates the Cultural Economics Research Group. A consistent focus of Bronwyn’s research has been on empirically motivated evidence-based research involving different aspects of art, culture and the creative industries. Bronwyn is also a part of the multi-disciplinary team of researchers involved in the Kinomatics Project, which analyzes a big cultural data set (in excess of 330 million records) to explore the diffusion and flow of film as a cultural product around the world. Karel Dibbets  was a leading historian of cinema in the Netherlands and the curator of Cinema Context (www.cinemacontext.nl), an online encyclopedia of the history of Dutch film culture. Previously he was Assistant Professor in Media History at the University of Amsterdam (1983–2011) and prior to that editor of Skrien, a leading Dutch monthly film review (1981–1983). Silvia Dibeltulo  is Senior Lecturer in Communication, Media and Culture at Oxford Brookes University, UK, where she previously worked on the AHRC-funded Italian Cinema Audiences project. Her work centers on screen representations of identity, film genre theory and history, audience and reception studies, cinema heritage, and digital humanities. Her publications include the article “Family, Gang and Ethnicity in Italian-themed Hollywood Gangster Films,” which appeared in Film International (2015) and the book chapter “Old and New Irish Ethnics: Exploring ethnic and gender representation in P.S. I Love You” (in Ireland and Cinema: Culture and Contexts, Palgrave Macmillan, 2015). Mariagrazia Fanchi is Full Professor in Media Studies and Cultural History at the C ­ atholic University in Milan, Italy. Her book publications include I nuovi cinema paradiso (with A ­ lberto Bourlot, 2017), L’Audience (2014), Terre incognite (2008), and Identità mediatiche (2002). Her research interests revolve around Italian media audiences, history and cultures.

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Contributors

Kathryn Fuller-Seeley is Professor of Media Studies at the University of Texas at Austin, USA. Her research explores the cultural contexts surrounding media history and their audiences. Her publications include At the Picture Show: Small Town Audiences and the Creation of Movie Fan Culture (1997) and One Thousand Nights at the Movies: An Illustrated History of Motion Pictures 1895–1915 (2013). Her most recent book is Jack Benny and the Golden Age of American Radio Comedy (University of California Press, 2017). Douglas Gomery is Emeritus Professor at the University of Maryland and resident scholar at the Library of American Broadcasting, USA. He has authored 24 books, including the prize-winning Shared Pleasures: A History of Movie Presentation (1991) and Who Owns the Media? (2000), as well as more than 600 articles on the American media industry. With Robert C. Allen, he co-authored Film History: Theory and Practice (1985), a standard in the theory and practice of film history for more than two generations. His current research is on the Motion Picture Association of America. Together with Clara Pafort-Overduin he is working on a book about the history of Paramount. Danielle Hipkins  is Associate Professor of Italian Studies and Film at the University of Exeter, UK. She has written widely on gender representation in post-war Italian cinema, and has recently published Italy’s Other Women: Gender and Prostitution in Italian Cinema, 1940–1965 (Peter Lang, 2016). She was also co-editor of Prostitution and Sex Work in Global Cinema (Palgrave, 2017) with Kate Taylor-Jones, and is currently working on girlhood and Italian culture. She was a co-investigator on the AHRC-funded Italian Cinema Audiences project, a study of memories of cinemagoing in Italy of the 1950s with the Universities of Bristol and Oxford Brookes (2013–2016). Eric Hoyt is Associate Professor of Communication Arts at the University of W ­ isconsinMadison and the Director of the Media History Digital Library (http://­mediahistoryproject. org). He was the lead developer of the MHDL’s search platform, Lantern (http://lantern. mediahist.org), and analytics app, Arclight (http://projectarclight.org). He is the author of Hollywood Vault: Film Libraries before Home Video (University of California Press, 2014) and a co-editor of two anthologies, Hollywood and the Law (BFI/Palgrave, 2015) and The ­Arclight Guidebook to Media History and the Digital Humanities (REFRAME/Project ­A rclight, 2016). He is currently working on a new book about the history of the Hollywood trade press. Catherine Jurca  is Professor in the Division of Humanities and Social Sciences at the ­California Institute of Technology, USA. She is the author of White Diaspora: The Suburb and the Twentieth-Century American Novel (Princeton University Press, 2001) and Hollywood 1938: Motion Pictures’ Greatest Year (University of California Press, 2012). Dilek Kaya is Associate Professor of Communications at Yasar University, Izmir, Turkey. She is the author of The Midnight Express Phenomenon: The International Reception of the Film Midnight Express (The Isis Press, 2005; Georgias Press, 2010). She has published essays in national and international journals predominantly focusing on the extra-filmic aspects of Turkish cinema, including cinema exhibition and reception, movie stardom and fandom in the 1960s and 1970s, the censorship of domestic and foreign films, and Islamic national cinema.

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Frank Kessler is Professor of Media History at Utrecht University and currently the Director of Utrecht University’s Research Institute for Cultural Inquiry (ICON), the ­Netherlands. His research interests lie in the field of early cinema and the history of film theory. He is a co-founder and co-editor of KINtop: Jahrbuch zur Erforschung des frühen Films and the ­K INtop-Schriften series. From 2003 to 2007 he was the president of DOMITOR, the international association to promote research on early cinema. With Nanna Verhoeff he edited Networks of Entertainment. Early Film Distribution 1895–1915 ( John Libbey, 2007). His other publications include Mise en scène (caboose, 2014). Jeffrey Klenotic is Associate Professor at the University of New Hampshire. He is a founding member of the History of Moviegoing, Exhibition and Reception (HoMER) network and developer of Mapping Movies (http://www.mappingmovies.com), a GIS platform for cinema’s spatial history. Annette Kuhn is Emeritus Professor in Film Studies at Queen Mary University of London and a Fellow of the British Academy, UK. As Director of Cinema Culture in 1930s Britain, she pioneered the ethnohistorical study of cinemagoing, and has written widely on cultural memory in relation to both photography and cinema. Publications in these areas include An Everyday Magic: Cinema and Cultural Memory (2002, US title Dreaming of Fred and Ginger); Family Secrets: Acts of Memory and Imagination (2002); Locating Memory: Photographic Acts (2006, co-edited with Kirsten Emiko McAllister); and a special issue of Memory Studies on cinemagoing experience and memory (2017, co-edited with Daniel Biltereyst and Philippe Meers). Sabine Lenk is a film archivist and media historian. From 2015 to 2017, she was a researcher in the European project A Million Pictures: Magic Lantern Slide Heritage as Artifacts in the Common European History of Learning at the University of Antwerp’s Research Centre for Visual Poetics. In 2017, she co-authored the successful application for the Belgian funding scheme Excellence of Science for a project entitled B-Magic. The Magic Lantern and Its Cultural Impact as Visual Mass Medium in Belgium (1830–1940). She is a co-founder and co-editor of KINtop, KINtop Schriften, and KINtop Studies in Early Cinema. Martin Loiperdinger  is Emeritus Professor of Media Studies at the University of Trier, Germany. His contributions to magic lantern, film and cinema history include articles, books, exhibitions, DVDs, and television features. For many years, he has been conducting the research focus Screen1900. He co-edited KINtop, the German yearbook of early cinema, and is co-editor of KINtop Studies in Early Cinema. With Uli Jung, he edited Importing Asta Nielsen: The International Film Star in the Making 1910–1914 (2013). He co-ordinates the Importing Asta Nielsen Database and the Asta Nielsen research project (in collaboration with Yvonne Zimmermann). José Carlos Lozano  is Professor of Communication and Chair of the Psychology and Communication Department at Texas A&M International University, Laredo, Texas, USA, and a Research Fellow at Tecnológico de Monterrey, Mexico. He is the author of numerous books and journal articles on mass and international communication, including a textbook in mass communication theories widely used in Mexican and Latin American schools. He is co-principal investigator and coordinator of an international research project (with Daniel Biltereyst and Philippe Meers) comparing the historical exhibition of films and cinemagoing in Laredo, Barcelona, Cartagena de Indias and five Mexican cities. xviii

Contributors

Richard Maltby  is the Matthew Flinders Distinguished Professor of Screen Studies at Flinders University, Adelaide, and a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities. He has co-edited seven books on the history of cinema audiences, exhibition and reception, including Explorations in New Cinema History (2011) and Going to the Movies: Hollywood and the Social Experience of Cinema (2007). His other books include Hollywood Cinema (2003) and “Film Europe” and “Film America”: Cinema, Commerce and Cultural Exchange, 1925–1939 (1999). He is Series Editor of Exeter Studies in Film History, and is currently writing a history of Warner Bros. for the Routledge Hollywood Centenary series. Philippe Meers  is Professor in Film and Media Studies at the University of Antwerp, ­Belgium, where he chairs the Center for Mexican Studies and is deputy director of the Visual and Digital Cultures Research Center (ViDi). He has published widely on historical and contemporary film cultures and audiences in e.g. Screen and Media, Culture & Society. With ­R ichard Maltby and Daniel Biltereyst, he co-edited Explorations in New Cinema History: Approaches and Case Studies (Wiley-Blackwell, 2011) and Audiences, Cinema and Modernity: New Perspectives on European Cinema History (Routledge, 2012). With Annette Kuhn and Daniel Biltereyst, he co-edited a special issue of Memory Studies (2017) on cinemagoing experience and memory. Paul S. Moore is Associate Professor of Communication and Culture at Ryerson University in Toronto, and past President of the Film Studies Association of Canada. His histories of cinema and newspaper intermediality have appeared in the Companion to Early Cinema (2012), Explorations in New Cinema History (2011), and Early Popular Visual Culture, among other publications. His award-winning book Now Playing (SUNY, 2008) recounts the history of early moviegoing in Toronto, tracing how the novelty of film became a mass practice through showmanship, regulation, and promotion. Marina Nicoli  is a research fellow in the AHRC funded project Producers and Production Practices in the History of Italian Cinema 1949–1975, led by Stephen Gundle at the Department of Film and Television Studies, Warwick University, UK. She has published essays in national and international journals on the economic history of Italian cinema, international co-productions and distribution practices. Her book The Rise and Fall of the Italian Film Industry has been published in 2016 by Routledge. Catherine O’Rawe is Reader in Modern Italian Culture at the University of Bristol, UK. She is author of Stars and Masculinities in Contemporary Italian Cinema (2014, Palgrave), and of essays on post-war and contemporary Italian cinema, stardom, and genre. She was Co-­ Investigator on the Arts and Humanities Research Council-funded project Italian Cinema Audiences 1945–1960, which ran from 2013 to 2016. Clara Pafort-Overduin is Lecturer and researcher in the Department of Media and Culture Studies and the Institute for Cultural Inquiry at Utrecht University, the Netherlands. She is a founding member and coordinator of the HoMER (History of Moviegoing Exhibition and Reception) network. She has published several book chapters and articles on the popularity of national (Dutch) films. Together with economic historian John Sedgwick and marketing economist Jaap Boter, she published on the peculiarities of the structure and development of the Dutch film market in the 1930s. Together with Douglas Gomery, she wrote the student handbook Movie History: A Survey (Routledge, 2012). xix

Contributors

Stephen Putnam Hughes  is Senior Lecturer at the Department of Anthropology and Sociology, SOAS, University of London, where he is the Director of Studies for the MA program in the Anthropology of Media. Having lived and worked in Tamil speaking south India on and off over the course of the last thirty years, he has conducted research and published on various topics related to the social and cultural history of media, religion and politics, including filmgoing and cinema exhibition, nonfiction film, the gramophone industry, radio, musical drama, and film songs. Dafna Ruppin holds a PhD in Media and Performance Studies from Utrecht University, the Netherlands. Her research on the exhibition, consumption, and production of early cinema in colonial Indonesia formed part of the research project The Nation and Its Other, funded by the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO). Her book The Komedi Bioscoop: Early Cinema in Colonial Indonesia was published by John Libbey/Indiana University Press in 2016 as part of the KINtop Studies in Early Cinema series. John Sedgwick  is a visiting researcher at Oxford Brookes University. He researches the business and economic history of film, and is particularly interested in measures of film popularity and what these tell us about audiences and industry structure. He has written a monograph (Popular Films in 1930s Britain, 2000) and published articles in Business History, Cinema Journal, Economic History Review, Explorations in Economic History, Enterprise and Society, Film History, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, Journal of Applied Statistics, Journal of Cultural Economics, Journal of Economic History, and Journal of Transnational Cinema.  Tim Snelson is Senior Lecturer in Media History at the University of East Anglia, UK, and Director of the East Anglian Film Archive. His research addresses the relationship between media and social history. He is the author of Phantom Ladies: Hollywood Horror and the Home Front (Rutgers, 2014). Melvyn Stokes is Professor of Film History, University College London (UCL), UK. He co-organized two large conferences on audiences for Hollywood movies at UCL (1998, 2003) and has co-edited five books on the subject (1999–2007). He is the author of D.W. Griffith’s “The Birth of a Nation”: A History of “The Most Controversial Motion Picture of All Time” (OUP, 2007), Gilda (BFI Film Classics/Palgrave-Macmillan, 2010) and American History through Hollywood Film: From the Revolution to the 1960s (Bloomsbury, 2013). He has directed two major Arts and Humanities Research Council projects on Cultural Memory and British Cinema-going of the 1960s (2013–2015) and Remembering 1960s British Cinema-going (2017–2018). Judith Thissen is Associate Professor of Film History at Utrecht University in the Department of Media and Culture, the Netherlands. Her research deals with the social history of cinemagoing and has been published in journals including Film History, CiNéMAS, Théorème, Theatre Survey, Alphaville, KINtop and Tijdschrift voor Mediageschiedenis as well as in numerous edited collections. With Clemens Zimmermann she recently edited Cinema beyond the City: Small-Town and Rural Film Culture in Europe (BFI, 2016). Her new project explores the relationship between film culture and rural modernization in the Netherlands and France. Daniela Treveri Gennari is Reader in Film Studies at Oxford Brookes University, UK. Her work on post-war popular cinema, audiences, film exhibition, and programming has xx

Contributors

been published both in journals including The Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, and in the edited collections Requiem for a Nation: Religion, Politics and Visual Cultures in Post-war Italy, 1945–1975 (2016), and Rural Cinema Exhibition and Audiences in a Global Context (2018). After leading a major AHRC funded project, Italian Cinema Audiences with the Universities of Bristol and Exeter, Treveri Gennari is currently leading the AHRC funded research European Cinema Audiences: Entangled Histories and Shared Memories. Lies Van de Vijver is postdoctoral researcher at the Centre for Cinema and Media Studies, Ghent University, Belgium. Her research focuses on historical and contemporary screen culture, film programming and cinema experience in Ghent, and has been published in Cultural Studies and The Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, and in edited collections. She is currently project manager of European Cinema Audiences (AHRC), a comparative research project examining cinema audiences in seven European cities in the 1950s. Thunnis van Oort  is a media historian, working at the University of Amsterdam and ­Oxford Brookes University. He published a dissertation on the emergence of cinema exhibition in the Catholic South of the Netherlands (Film en het Moderne Leven in Limburg, 2007). He has taught at universities in Utrecht, Amsterdam and Middelburg, and visited Antwerp University as a Marie Curie Pegasus research fellow at ViDi. He has published in international edited volumes and in journals such as Film History, Historical Journal for Radio, Film and Television and the European Review of History, and is editor of the Dutch media historical journal Tijdschrift voor Mediageschiedenis. Deb Verhoeven  is Associate Dean of Engagement and Innovation at University of ­Technology Sydney (UTS), Australia. An agitator, commentator and critic, Verhoeven is the author of more than 100 journal articles and book chapters as well as a book on Jane ­Campion published by Routledge in 2009. Verhoeven is a former CEO of the Australian Film Institute and Deputy Chair, National Film and Sound Archive in Australia, as well as former Chair of the widely read film journal Senses of Cinema and editor for the journal Studies in Australasian Cinema. Dylan Walker is Research Associate at Flinders University, Adelaide, Australia. His research covers film distribution and exhibition in rural South Australia from 1897 to the late 1930s. He has published articles on rural cinema exhibition and his book, Adelaide’s Silent Nights (1996), deals with the history of cinemas in Adelaide, South Australia, during the silent era. Gregory A. Waller is the editor of Film History: An International Journal and Provost Professor in the Media School at Indiana University, USA, where he directs Cinema and Media Studies. His publications include Main Street Amusements: Movies and Commercial Entertainment in a Southern City, 1896–1930 (1995), which won the Film Library Association award for best book and the Katherine Singer Kovacs award of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies. His recent publications have focused on the history of multi-sited, multi-purpose film, including articles on audiences for nontheatrical film, researching digital archives, and International Harvester’s sponsored films in the 1910s.  Zoë Wallin  is Research Associate at Flinders University, Adelaide, Australia, where she completed her PhD in 2017. Her research considers the industrial operation of film cycles in the Hollywood studio system and her work has been published in The Velvet Light Trap. xxi

Contributors

Mike Walsh is Associate Professor of Screen and Media at Flinders University in A ­ delaide, Australia. He has published extensively on Asian cinema and Australian exhibition and ­d istribution. He is one of the developers of the Cinema Audiences in Australia Research Project database and the AusCinemas database. He is also long-term program consultant and catalogue editor for the Adelaide Film Festival.

xxii

Acknowledgments

We would like to express first and foremost our sincere gratitude to the staff at Routledge for their excellent guidance throughout the entire editing process of this volume, with a special thanks going to Natalie Foster, Jennifer Vennall, and Sheni Kruger. Similarly, we wish to thank the contributors, whose stimulating work, enthusiasm, and patience brought this volume into being. A very special thanks goes to Robert C. Allen and Annette Kuhn, two pioneering scholars in the field of new cinema history, for accepting the invitation to be interviewed about their work and for sharing their views on the past and futures of the field. Most of the chapters in this collection are based on research papers presented at conferences of the History of Moviegoing, Exhibition, and Reception (HoMER) network organized by John Caughie and Maria Velez-Serna in Glasgow (20–24 June 2015), and by Julia ­Bohlmann, Annemone Ligensa, Lies Van de Vijver and Maria Velez-Serna in Potsdam (28–30 July 2016). Unlike many international academic organizations, HoMER is an explicitly lightly structured, un-bureaucratic network promoting new historiographical work on cinema cultures and experiences in the past. We hope that this Companion to New Cinema History shows how productive and stimulating this HoMER environment has proven to be, and that its principles of sharing, collaboration and openness are no idle words. Finally, we thank our families for all their support and forbearance during this book’s journey to completion.

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Introduction The scope of new cinema history Daniel Biltereyst, Richard Maltby, and Philippe Meers

People say that the savage no longer exists in us, that we are at the fag-end of civilization, that everything has been said already, and that it is too late to be ambitious. But philosophers have presumably forgotten the movies. They have never seen the savages of the twentieth century watching the pictures. They have never sat themselves in front of the screen and thought how for all the clothes on their backs and the carpets at their feet, no great distance separates them from those bright-eyed naked men who knocked two bars of iron together and heard in that clangour a foretaste of the music of Mozart. (Virginia Woolf, 1926, The Cinema)

Woolf, “The Cinema” and savages In her essay on “The Cinema” (1926/1993), Virginia Woolf compares film audiences with savages who, although sitting in a luxurious cinematic space, watch primitive pictures with an untrained, “unaesthetic eye” (p. 54). Woolf ’s comparison of film viewers with savages continues in the next paragraph, where she describes the disordered visual and aural atmosphere in the venue: “All is hubble-bubble, swarm and chaos” (p. 55). By the end of the article, however, Woolf has moderated her description to celebrate film’s aesthetic potential, revealed in moments when “in the midst of its immense dexterity and enormous technical proficiency, the curtain parts and we behold, far off, some unknown and unexpected beauty” (p. 57). It is not our intention here to reread “The Cinema” as a precursor to the work we pre­ sent in this Companion to New Cinema History. Woolf ’s description of cinematic place, space, sound, the audience’s behavior, and its relation to “the chaos of the streets” outside (p. 57) is not only too short but also quite contemptuous of the world of the cinema as she experienced it. Her brief description of cinema as a social institution also served only as a contextualizing frame for her central argument, which is about film as a new art form with a unique but unexplored creative power. Unsurprisingly, “The Cinema” is now often (re-)interpreted within film studies as an important essay on literature/film adaptation (e.g. Cartmell and Whelehan, 1999, 2010; Leitch, 2017: 2) and on the movies’ aesthetic and affective powers (e.g. Trotter, 2007: 159–179; Pisters, 2015: 154; Ingersoll, 2016). Moving from the commercial venues she describes in her opening paragraphs to the eli­ tist Film Society screenings that she often attended, Woolf ’s treatise is also firmly rooted in 1

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what Lawrence Napper (2009: 69) has described as the “highbrow/lowbrow polarization” of ­British cinema culture in the 1920s. Besides her “misapprehension of the sophistication both of the classical Hollywood system (and) British film-making during the 1920s” (­Napper, 2009: 68), Woolf also disparages the “savage” film viewers with whom she watches the pictures. With its aesthetic focus on film as an apparatus and medium, Woolf ’s socially and culturally specific perspective incorporates a position that is arguably very distant from new cinema history’s concerns. The essay does, however, go beyond an analysis of the movies’ “devices” and “visual emotion” to connect these formal properties with issues of cinematic place and space, ­programming and with the audiences consuming those pictures. In that sense, Woolf ’s ­essay embraces one of the key ambitions behind this Companion and the perspective of new ­cinema history: to integrate the history of film into a broader history of cinema as a sociocultural institution. Throughout her essay, Woolf seeks to grasp the complexity of cinema as a larger phenomenon than the images screened in front of an audience. It is a multifaceted concept, encompassing the films themselves and the more abstract notion of cinema as a particular form of art and entertainment, but it also involves a specific place (the cinema as exhibition and a physical venue); a space (an imaginary and socially embedded version of this site); an industry (of production, distribution, exhibition and circulation); an experience (­cinemagoing as a sensory and imaginative practice); and even a way of life (in which people act, talk, play or think “cinematically” – comme du cinéma – in everyday life).

New cinema history, cinema experiences, and a culture of abundance One of the driving impulses behind new cinema history is the desire to explore the history of this broader, under-researched phenomenon, which has profoundly affected the reconfiguration of twentieth-century society. One reason for the failure to comprehend the sociocultural, politico-economic and ideological roles played by an institution which so powerfully caught people’s minds and imagination is that the post-war process of institutionalizing the academic study of cinema became myopically focused on Woolf ’s principal concerns, the films and the medium as an art form. Despite the variety of mainstream approaches within film studies, it remains the case that a large proportion of the scholarship produced by the discipline continues to resemble film critics’ engagements with movies as objects of aesthetic and interpretive enquiry and their analysis of filmmakers’ “vision du monde” (see Allen and Gomery, 1985; Allen, 1990, 2006; Maltby, 2006, 2007, 2011). There is nothing wrong with focusing on film style and ideology, on genres and authors, or on textually inscribed spectatorship. Questions of film style, aesthetics, representation, appeal, and spectatorship are obviously important to the study of cinema. But one of the consequences of the continued concentration on the products of an industry (rather than on the industry itself ), on the question how societal and ideological tendencies are reflected in films (rather than on more complex inquiries about the interaction of cinema and society), or on spectatorship (rather than examining actual audiences in all their diversities), is that this body of scholarly work has not been able to answer, or even address, key questions of cinema’s history. The concentration on film production and on a Eurocentric selection of canonical texts has obstructed an examination of issues related to the movies’ circulation, exhibition, and consumption. As a discipline, film studies has not sought to provide sophisticated answers to basic questions about the operation of cinema as a social phenomenon. How popular was cinema at a given time and place? How popular was it compared to other forms of entertainment and pastimes? Were the canonical movies successful, and if so, where and 2

Introduction

with whom, and what about other now largely forgotten pictures? What made people decide to go to a particular cinema, how did they go, with whom, and how did they decide to watch a particular picture? Where and how were movies screened, and how were they received in different sociocultural environments? One of the aims of this Companion to New Cinema History, and more generally of new cinema history as a revisionist historiographical endeavor, is to examine these and related questions by emphasizing the need to understand the cinematic experience as a broader sociocultural phenomenon. The structure of this volume, which has its origins in research presented at conferences organized by the History of Moviegoing, Exhibition, and Reception (HoMER) network,1 reflects this commitment to examine underexplored dimensions of the cinematic experience in issues of film distribution and circulation (see chapters in Part III), questions of the place, space and practices of film exhibition (Part IV) and programming (Part V), as well as audiences’ cinemagoing practices, experiences and memories (Part VI). This volume is part of a broader reorientation which has, in the last twenty years or so,  led to an undisputable change in how we look at and study cinema (see Stokes and Maltby, 1999a, 1999b, 2001; Maltby and Stokes, 2004; Maltby, Stokes and Allen, 2007; Maltby, Biltereyst, and Meers, 2011; Biltereyst, Maltby, and Meers, 2012). This trend, which has been described as moving from a history of films towards a cinema history (Maltby, 2011: 3–4), has far-ranging implications not only for the aspects of the cinematic experience under examination, but also for the research questions it has raised and the sources, methods, disciplines, and theories it has used. The work sailing under new cinema history’s flag (e.g. Maltby, Biltereyst, and Meers, 2011; Biltereyst, Maltby, and Meers, 2012; Moran and Aveyard, 2013; Thissen and Zimmerman, 2016; Treveri Gennari, Hipkins, and O’Rawe, 2018) obviously does not have a monopoly on interdisciplinary historical research in the field or in fostering an open research agenda (see, for example, Lagny, 1994; Fuller, 1996; Lewis and Smoodin, 2007; Fuller-Seeley, 2008), but we would argue that new cinema history’s perspective has been ground-breaking in focusing on the wider cinema experience from an intrinsically interdisciplinary perspective. It has also consistently decentered a focus on film texts by reconsidering what are often mistakenly framed as issues of “context,” a concept which too operates as a device to reinforce the primacy of the text by herding other considerations into its container. Acknowledging the “heterogeneity and open-endedness of the experience of cinema” (Allen, 2011: 55), new cinema history has been profoundly influenced by other disciplines: social history (see Chapter 10); economic history (Chapters 12 and 21); geography (­Chapter 16); social anthropology (Chapter 28); cultural and memory studies (Chapters 27 and 30); and urban studies and other disciplines across the humanities and social sciences (­Chapter 31). Fostering interdisciplinarity, new cinema historiography now also fully embraces the opportunities and benefits of the digital humanities and the computational turn, with their ethos of collaboration and the sharing of data, their new types of questions and research designs, new procedures of data collection, processing and analysis, and their innovations in funding, presenting and valorizing cinema historical scholarship through crowd sourcing and public engagement. Cinema historians now build and utilize large, systematically constructed datasets on various cinema-related issues, they use mapping and geospatial techniques, and apply text mining and other tools enabling them to search through large sets of digitized magazines and newspapers (see Chapters 6, 7, 11, and 29). Speculating about the perspective’s post-disciplinary attitude, Deb Verhoeven (2012) has argued that new cinema history research tends to be more “problem oriented, rather than discipline or program specific.” As part of this shift, an increasing number of research 3

Daniel Biltereyst, Richard Maltby, and Philippe Meers

projects within the perspective share a focus on the centrality of collection building and curation, and the will to conduct data-driven analysis. Large databases are now available with information on the location of cinemas and programming, sometimes including oral history accounts, pictures, and other archival material. Some of these databases, like the pioneering Cinema Context, the Dutch online encyclopedia and research tool developed by the late Karel Dibbets and his team for studying film culture in the Netherlands, are available online (see Chapter 27).2 In other countries datasets on various aspects of historical cinema cultures are available as open source platforms, where current and future generations of scholars can extract data and explore new research topics (e.g. Chapter 25).3 The increasing number of analytical tools, methodological choices and available data also enable cinema historians to move beyond linear models of cinema history; as Robert Allen argues in an interview for this volume, “the source material that is now available through digital means supports discovery, serendipity and the asking of new questions.” Paraphrasing the late Roy Rosenzweig (2003), the American historian who played a key role in the use of information technology to advance scholarship in the humanities, it is safe to claim that the field of cinema studies also now faces a fundamental paradigm shift from a culture of scarcity to one of abundance. The recent proliferation of projects and datasets on film exhibition, programming or audience experiences, has created an enormous potential for data to be integrated and compared, larger patterns to be discovered, and hypotheses to be tested.4 Together with longitudinal research across time (see Chapters 18 and 21), the availability of these data allows for comparative research across geographical borders (see Chapter 9).5 One of the premises of new cinema history is that this growing amount of often fine-grained data will enable a profound renewal of the field as it reconstructs older, less securely evidence-based narratives.

Heterogeneity, connections, and disciplinary boundaries This program to renew the field through an engagement with a broader exploration of cinema raises many questions and challenges. One point of contention is the extent to which new cinema history’s refocusing of research concerns renders it worthy of its claim to novelty, rather than just being part of a continual discourse of corrective revisionism within the discipline of film studies (Klenotic 1994: 46). A second issue, addressing the coherence of new cinema history as an academic practice, engages with the heterogeneity of the work done within its perspective. New cinema history’s umbrella covers studies of exhibition as well as work on the circulation and consumption of films and on the cinema as a site of social and cultural exchange. While an important element of new cinema historical research has been in the production of microhistories of particular exhibition venues, it has also seen the construction of big datasets with the capacity to address macro-historical issues. Research into the cinema experience includes examinations of top-down institutional and corporate strategies, while other studies look for bottom-up experiences, often within the intellectual tradition of cultural and memory studies. New cinema history’s methodological heterogeneity, therefore, raises questions about the perspective’s focus and disciplinary boundaries. One way of locating those boundaries is by tracing the strands of research covered under its umbrella, because new cinema history can perhaps best be conceived as a strategic coalescence and enhancement of older research traditions. One of the important strands within the perspective stems from earlier work on film reception inspired by cultural studies approaches (e.g. Taylor, 1989, on female fans and Gone with the Wind) and studies of audiences’ experiences and memories of films and cinemagoing (e.g. Stacey, 1994). Annette Kuhn’s study of 4

Introduction

cinema culture in Britain in the 1930s (1999, 2002), which combined traditions of feminist theory, psychoanalytical approaches to film and insights and methods from memory studies and oral history, has been particularly influential on the body of subsequent research on audiences (see Chapter 2 and chapters in Part VI). Another research strand addresses film exhibition structures and practices (represented in this book by Chapters 13, 14, 15, and 22), a body of research that builds on the work of scholars such as Karel Dibbets (1980), Douglas Gomery (1992), and Gregory Waller (1995, 2002). Although this direction has a longer tradition going back to industrial histories and political-economic work on the film industry (e.g. Bächlin, 1947; Guback, 1969), much remains to be done, for instance on the central role of distributors as gatekeepers in the supply of pictures (see chapters in Part III). A related field concentrates on systematic analyzes of film programming (Chapters 21 and 26). At the crossroads of different traditions, this work not only examines how exhibitors have used different tactics in order to attract audiences, but also foregrounds issues of film popularity and how audiences’ choices are structured.6 New cinema history could then be seen as no more than a heterogeneous amalgamation of various research strands and traditions, but its underlying premise is, as Allen (2011: 55) has argued, to “rethink the history of cinema as the history of the experience of cinema.” ­A llen insists on conceiving of cinematic experiences as intrinsically “relational, heterogeneous, and open-ended,” and thus not reducible to the conveniences of grand narrative. Invoking Gilles Deleuze’s concept of connections in his interview for this Companion, Allen stresses the need to think about cinema in terms of “the social and cultural connections of which it is a part,” rather than perceiving the film text as an object to be placed in a pre-­ established historical context. Nowhere are these connections more required than if one wishes to understand audiences’ varied temporally and spatially embedded experiences. In this endeavor, a triangulation of methods, concepts and theories is required in order not to fall back on generalizations or grand theories. Only a multiscopic perspective will provide the means to comprehend audiences’ intrinsically multilayered experiences. From such a perspective, to examine exhibition is also to study the places and spaces where audiences watched movies. Examining programming informs us about the preconditioning strategies for guiding audiences and enables us to measure choice, preferences and the popularity of films and genres. Examining the event of screening pictures reveals the orchestration of audiences’ imagination, while oral histories reveal a multiplicity of the traces that cinema leaves in peoples’ lives. Much of this work on audiences and exhibition is driven by the belief that such a bottom-up p­ erspective fundamentally changes our understanding of cinema, obliging us to reconsider and revise top-down canonized narratives that have focused on films and abstract spectatorship. This call for a multiscopic, dialogic research agenda is not new. Some of the earliest studies, including those of Emilie Altenloh (1914) and Hugo Münsterberg (1916), were exercises in social and psychological enquiry into the functions that cinema performed for its audiences. Of particular interest for new cinema history as a collective historiographic enterprise are the remarkable but poorly comprehended Payne Fund Studies undertaken in the early 1930s in the United States. Although new cinema history’s perspective is radically different from this closely monitored, large-scale research program into the effects of the movies, some parallels can be observed. One exists in that project’s decision not to rely on a few methodologies for understanding the pictures’ role in influencing audiences and society, but rather to apply a multitude of research methods, ranging from questionnaires, content analysis and laboratory experiments to participant observation, open-ended interviews, autobiographies, and field studies. Although there were many frictions within the multidisciplinary 5

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program, most of its researchers operated with an open, self-critical agenda, and sought to avoid presuming the existence of cause-effect relationships or addressing movies and cinema in isolation from the totality of the social structure. From new cinema history’s perspective, the position taken by Paul G. Cressey, the “unsung hero of the Payne Fund project” ( Jowett, Jarvie, and Fuller, 1996: 125) who studied young boys’ cinemagoing in New York, is still inspiring. Before his work on motion pictures, Cressey had conducted a highly regarded and methodologically sophisticated study of taxi dance halls in Chicago, for which he used a remarkable variety of sources and methods, including interviews, observations and geographical mapping of the dance halls and their patrons’ residences along lines of ethnicity, nationality and class. In his book, The Taxi-Dance Hall (1932), Cressey sought to understand the distinct practices, vocabularies and codes of these venues through the interplay and dynamics of their organization, the experiences they provided and the control strategies exercised around them. For the Payne Fund, Cressey tried to operationalize a similar multiscopic approach in examining the experience of cinema, but he was unable to finalize the manuscript in time to include it in the published series funded by the project. He later reflected on his research experiences in a 1938 article for the American Sociological Review. Arguing that “the motion picture experience is studied only segmentally and never in its essential unity,” Cressey (1938: 518) proposed instead to look at cinema as a series of reciprocal relationships: between the screen and the spectator; between screen patterns and social values; and between the dark space of the cinema and the community in which it was located. Seeking to investigate the “interaction between imagination and social behavior,” Cressey argued for a program of research that recognized “all essential phases of the motion picture experience” and used a multiplicity of methods and sources with at least twenty different techniques, including statistics on film attendance, data on film preferences, interviews, participant observation, research on the venues’ location and advertisements, as well as considering non-cinematic data such as health records, socio-demographic data concerning the cinemagoers’ family structures, and their use of public services. From today’s perspective, Cressey’s never fully operationalized research agenda is still extreme in its multiscopic reach and in its undogmatic attitude towards disciplinary boundaries. The French Annales tradition of la nouvelle histoire provides another inspiring model for cinema historiography. Like new cinema history, it was less a school with a methodological orthodoxy than that it was a movement, a perspective or a style of doing innovative historical work. Notwithstanding differences of opinion between the scholars associated with the journal Annales d’histoire économique et sociale (1929), a recurrent trait in their work was to dismiss the “positivist” tradition of historiography then identified with political history (Ricœur, 1999: 52). Instead of producing an historical account of significant events presented as a narrative of causes and effects focused on individuals and elites, the new historiography took other, radically different directions in work on long-term structural trends, producing a social history of shifting mentalités, a “history without names” (Comte and Andreski, 1974: 203). In his authoritative introduction to the Annales revolution in the field, ­Peter Burke (1990/2015: 2) describes the approach as a “problem-oriented analytical history” which sought to capture historical change by introducing knowledge from a range of other disciplines. Fostering the idea of a total history (“histoire totale”; see Klinger, 1997), Annales historians called for interdisciplinarity, a “decompartmentalization,” and methodological experimentation (Burguière, 2009: 13). Their approaches drew from s­ ociology, ­geography, and psychology, developing techniques that produced a new kind of serial ­h istory deploying “anonymous” quantitative data that enabled a better knowledge of longterm trends (“de longue durée”). 6

Introduction

New cinema historians might take note of how, in its later developments, Annales historiography also embraced microhistories with geographically specified single-case studies, accounts of people’s everyday life, and anecdotal histories derived from personal sources. Although one of the leading Annales historians, Fernand Braudel, had originally dismissed a history of events (“histoire événementielle”), it became clear that intertwining microhistories into total history had many advantages. One of these was what Carlo Ginzburg (1993: 17) called the “circumscribed and close-up perspective,” which responded to the critique that the universalizing aspirations of the “macroscopic and quantitative model” produced a “history without people” (Le Roy Ladurie, 1979: 285). Although they operate at different analytical scales, microhistories make macro-analyses more tangible, comprehensible, visible, or just simply more concrete. In addition, the close-up perspective enables us to test, criticize, nuance or complement macro-analytical hypotheses by emphasizing lacunae, or highlighting the exceptional or marginal. Many of these methodological and epistemological considerations have resonance for new cinema history, where both micro- and macro-level perspectives prosper and cohabit.

Reflections, opportunities, and challenges We are locating new cinema history’s scope against this horizon of inspiring disciplinary formations as a perspective, a movement, or a “nebula” (Burke, 1990/2015: 73) of research seeking to understand the complexities of cinema cultures and the experience of cinema in the past. Reflecting on the emergence, growth and future of new cinema history, Parts I and II of this Companion provide a site for discussing the field’s challenges and opportunities, including some of the questions already raised in this Introduction: the usefulness of microhistories (Chapters 2 and 6); the need for interdisciplinary research (Chapter 11); new cinema history’s resistance to generalized narratives or theoretical constructs (­Chapter 5). Many ­challenges and opportunities relate to the practice of cinema historiography in a digital world, addressing questions of data abundance, analytics, and interoperability (­Chapter  8), while others provide a reminder of the continuing need for traditional archival work (­Chapter 10). In what follows, we discuss some other issues we regard as important for a perspective which needs to continuously rethink cinema history and remain open to the use of new research tools and technologies. A first set of reflections relates to a meta-theoretical reconsideration of the boundaries of the field by expanding the range of its sources. As we have suggested, the study of historical film audiences is arguably the oldest field of research in film studies, and the most commonly cited works form only the tip of an iceberg that remains to be explored.7 Film audience enquiries flourished in many countries as national, local, and judicial authorities ordered studies by psychologists, sociologists, and economists, most frequently focusing on children’s consumption of cinema but also covering a much broader and more diverse range of subjects, from the cinematographic education of the rural masses to the uses of cinema in the domain of medical jurisprudence.8 There were numerous industry-financed studies of cinema attendance and audience film preferences, as well as as-yet unexplored audience surveys, fan letters and testimonials in film magazines, and many more literary testimonies like Woolf ’s.9 A greater knowledge of this vast array of sources would provide us with an expanded understanding of the institutional and intellectual foundations of cinema studies, complementing, and extending recent accounts of the discipline’s evolution (Polan, 2007; Grieveson and Wasson, 2008). This rich body of older research can also provide us with insights not only into the film audiences and cinema culture it examines, but also into how 7

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public discourses about cinema and its audiences were constructed, and how these studies were put to social or ideological purpose. New cinema historians have also started to explore a range of other, previously underused sources, including fan letters, film diaries, scrapbooks, and other audience-generated materials. The industry produced an abundance of account books, ledgers, and statistical data, which has so far seen only limited application in examining the commercial tactics of film circulation and trade, on both national and international scales (see Chapter 22). The last decade has, however, seen the wholesale digitization of vast amounts of searchable newspaper and magazine material, which awaits investigation through text mining and other computer-aided methodologies, as well as more familiar methods (Moore, 2011; Abel, 2015). The wealth of photographic material in magazines and newspapers, as well as in archives, has so far mainly been used for illustrative purposes, but image-recognition software will allow these resources to be mined for the detailed evidence they contain about theater environments and the demographic composition and behavior of their audiences. More visually oriented analyses of advertising, from twenty-four-sheet posters to small newspaper announcements, might explore the intersection of industry marketing logics and audience’s imaginative engagement with cinema, as would a consideration of film-related ancillary material, toys, and collectibles. Related studies will enhance our understanding of the industry’s relationship to the structures, dynamics and strategies of the producers and distributors of mass-market magazines which have long relied heavily on film sources for much of their content (see Biltereyst and Van de Vijver, 2019). For Paul Cressey (1938: 518), cinema was a place of “interaction between imagination and social behavior … a unified experience involving always a specific film, a specific personality, a specific social situation and a specific time and mood.” Chapters 24, 26, and 27 examine the appeal of particular films, and speculate about the sources of their popularity. While these chapters and much other work demonstrates that there is no inherent antagonism between new cinema historiography and the examination of films, cinema’s imaginative dimension extends beyond the enjoyment of particular films; as Stephen Hughes argues in his contribution, “though some filmgoers may well have preferred to lose themselves within a film narrative, theater sociality routinely dominated cinema experience.” Recognizing that “we will never have any unmediated access to some autonomous or unified consciousness of filmgoers apart from our institutional and discursive sources,” Hughes, whose background is in social anthropology, argues for a phenomenological approach to historical cinema experiences. Although new cinema historians have not often explicitly adopted this approach, scholars from other disciplines have been less reluctant to deal with this imaginative dimension of the cinema experience. Focusing on an ethnography of historical cinema theaters in Northern Nigeria, for instance, American anthropologist Brian Larkin (2002: 319–320) calls cinema a “fantasy space … a stepping outside Africa to places elsewhere.” Larkin sees cinema theaters as “peculiar kinds of social spaces marked by a duality of presence and absence, rootedness and transport,” that is created by their ability to “destabilize and make mobile people, ideas, and commodities.” For Larkin, colonial cinema theaters created “new social spaces of sexual, ethnic, religious, and racial intermixing, making them ambivalent institutions that often threatened existing hierarchies and boundaries about the public use of space” (pp. 232–233). Writing about cinema’s role in the former Belgian and French African colonies, French social historian Odile Georg (2015: 7–8) has similarly argued that cinema offered “an escape from the pressure of foreign dominance, an opening to the world, and an alternative to colonial discourse” (our translation). Describing the historical significance of cinema in the French protectorate of Tunisia in the 1950s, postcolonial historian Morgan 8

Introduction

Courriou (2010: 206, 210) also underscored cinema’s “liberating ambiance,” and its ability to become a “site of social and political contestation” (our translation). These works and others on cinema’s role in colonial societies (e.g. Corriou, 2015; ­Gondola, 2016) raise questions, challenges, and opportunities for new cinema historians, stressing the need not only for more research on cinema’s diversified global reach outside the Eurocentric hemisphere, but also on its capacity to awaken or reinforce people’s political or ideological consciousness.10 In his interview in this Companion, Allen suggests that although “we have tended to overestimate how much individual films have ‘mattered’ … we have grossly underestimated the magnitude of cinema as a social and a cultural phenomenon.” His argument that we can only gauge the importance of cinema as a broader social phenomenon by continuing to make connections between cinema and its audiences’ other experiences chimes with Cressey’s observation in 1938 that the motion picture experience had until then been studied “segmentally and never in its essential unity” (1938: 518). To a large extent, new cinema history, like film studies in general, has produced what Cressey called “particularistic studies,” dealing with one or a few dimensions of the cinematic experience. Comparative studies such as Chapter 9 are still rare, not least because of the complexities of obtaining properly comparable data, but also out of a recognition that cinema historical work needs clear temporally and spatially delineated research questions, problems and objects, and a commitment to avoiding the simplifying generalizations of grand narratives. New cinema history’s stress on the complexities, the social embeddedness and the highly locally situated character of the cinema experience makes moving beyond the particularistic a significant challenge, but one that the field’s open and dialogic research agenda is now both sufficiently mature and equipped to undertake. Developing the capacity in our sources and methods to address Allen’s imperative will be a major task for the “new new cinema history” that he identifies as the next iteration of our approach.

Notes 1 HoMER was founded in June 2004 by an international group of cinema researchers interested in understanding the complex phenomena of cinema-going, exhibition, and reception, from a multidisciplinary perspective. HoMER organizes workshops and conferences, and encourages the dissemination of new models of collaborative research. See http://homernetwork.org [Accessed 28 November 2018]. Some of the work in this volume was initially presented at HoMER conferences in Glasgow (20–24 June 2015) and Potsdam (Germany, 28–30 July, 2016). 2 See the Cinema Context platform at www.cinemacontext.nl [Accessed 28 November 2018]. 3 See the Film Culture in Brno (1945–1970) Project at www.phil.muni.cz/dedur [Accessed 28 ­November 2018]. 4 Projects and online platforms on film exhibition include: the Australian Cinemas Map (auscinemas. flinders.edu.au/), the Belgian Cinecos (www.ugent.be/ps/communicatiewetenschappen/cims/ en/research/cinema-ecosystem.htm), the Czech Film Culture in Brno (1945–1970) Project (www. phil.muni.cz/dedur), Early Cinema in Scotland (earlycinema.gla.ac.uk/), European Cinema ­Audiences (­europeancinemaaudiences.org), the German Early Cinema Database (www.earlycinema.­uni-koeln. de/), http://londonfilm.bbk.ac.uk/ North Carolina’s Going to the Show (http://gtts.oasis.unc.edu/), Italian Cinema Audiences (italiancinemaaudiences.org/), Kinomatics (https://kinomatics.com/), The London Project (http://londonfilm.bbk.ac.uk/), Mapping Movies (www.­mappingmovies.com/), the Scottish Cinemas and Theaters Project (www.scottishcinemas.org.uk/). Some of these ­platforms have programming data, which can also be found on the Asta Nielsen Project (http://­importingasta-nielsen.deutsches-filminstitut.de/), Cinema Context, ECHO/Early Cinema History Online (http://echo.commarts.wisc.edu), and the Dutch Mapping Desmet (mappingdesmet.human ities.uva.nl). Audience’s cinemagoing memories are available at platforms like the British 1960s Cinema Memories (www.ucl.ac.uk/cinemamemories), European Cinema Audiences, Italian Cinema Audiences and the Norfolk at the Pictures Project (norfolkatthepictures.org.uk/). Film magazines,

9

Daniel Biltereyst, Richard Maltby, and Philippe Meers newspapers and other printed material in relation to cinema culture have recently been made available in digitized forms at platforms like the Media History Digital Library (mediahistoryproject. org/) and its Lantern and Arclight (search.projectarclight.org/), the French Calindex (www.calindex. eu), Ciné-Ressources (www.cineressources.net) and Cinépop 50 (extranet.u-bordeaux-montaigne.fr/ cinepop). For an overview of projects and platforms, see the digital HoMER platform (homernet work.org/dhp-projects/homer-projects-2/) and Cinema City Context (www.cinemacitycultures. com/links) [All accessed 28 November 2018]. 5 See the comparative projects European Cinema Audiences (on exhibition, programming and audience’s memories in seven European cities) and Cinema City Cultures (on exhibition and programming in a series of European and Latin American cities). 6 See, for instance, the pioneering work by Fabrice Montebello (1997) on Italian migrant communities in the northern French town of Longwy, and the role of cinema, conceived from a mixture of film studies, social history, and critical Bourdieuan sociology. Or the influential historical economic work by John Sedgwick (e.g. 2000; see Sedgwick and Nicoli in this volume). 7 As well as Altenloh, Münsterberg and the Payne Fund Studies, this list would include with ­Robert and Helen Lynd’s Middletown project (1929), the Mass Observation social research program (Richard and Sheridan, 1987/2016) and Jacob-Peter Mayer’s examinations of British cinema audiences (1945, 1948). Historical studies of reception (e.g. Staiger, 2000, 2005) form a distinct but related research practice. 8 A largely unused source of such studies is the International Review of Educational Cinematography (1929–1934), which is available from the Media History Digital Library at http://vsrv01.media historyproject.org/nontheatrical/index.html [Accessed 28 November 2018]. 9 Luke McKernan’s Picturegoing platform provides a valuable resource in its ongoing survey of literary sources and witness accounts of cinema and other viewing practices: picturegoing.com. 10 See an overview and a world map of new cinema history projects at http://homernetwork.org [Accessed 28 November 2018]. For work done in Mexico and other parts of Latin America in the context of the ‘Cultura de la Pantalla’ project, see www.cinemacitycultures.com/projects.html [Accessed 28 November 2018].

References Abel, R. (2015) Menus for Movieland: Newspapers and the Emergence of Film Culture, 1913–1916. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Allen, R.C. (1990) “From Exhibition to Reception: Reflections on the Audience in Film.” Screen 31: 347–356. Allen, R.C. (2006) “Relocating American Film History: The ‘Problem’ of the Empirical.” Cultural Studies 20: 48–88. Allen, R.C. (2011) “Reimagining the History of the Experience of Cinema in a Post-Moviegoing Age.” In R. Maltby, D. Biltereyst, and Ph. Meers (eds.) Explorations in New Cinema History: Approaches and Case Studies. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell (pp. 41–57). Allen, R.C. and Gomery, D. (1985) Film History: Theory and Practice. Boston, MA: McGraw-Hill. Altenloh, E. (1914/1977) Zur Soziologie des Kino: Die Kino-unternehmung und die sozialen Schichten ihrer Besucher. Leipzig: Spamerschen Buchdruckerei. Bächlin, P. (1947) Histoire économique du cinéma. Paris: La nouvelle édition. Biltereyst, D., Maltby, R., and Meers, Ph. (eds.) (2012) Cinema, Audiences and Modernity: New Perspectives on European Cinema History. London: Routledge. Biltereyst, D. and Van de Vijver, L. (eds.) (2019) Mapping Movie Magazines. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Burguière, A. (2009) The Annales School: An Intellectual History. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Burke, P. (1990/2015) The French Historical Revolution: The Annales School 1929–89. Cambridge: Polity Press. Cartmell, D. and Whelehan, I. (1999) Adaptations: From Text to Screen, Screen to Text. London: Routledge. Cartmell, D. and Whelehan, I. (2010) Screen Adaptation: Impure Cinema. Basingstoke: Palgrave. Comte, A. and Andreski, S (1974) The Essential Comte: Selections from Cours de Philosophie Positive. ­L ondon: Croom Helm. Corriou, M. (2010) “Hourras, ‘hou hou’ et tohu-bohu dans les cinémas de Tunisie à l’époque du protectorat.” In O. Carlier (ed.) Images du Maghreb, Images au Maghreb (XIXe –XXe siècles). Une révolution du visuel? Paris: L’Harmattan (pp. 203–236).

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Introduction Corriou, M. (2015) “Cinéma et urbanité à Tunis sous le protectorat français.” L’Année du Maghreb, 12: 181–195. https://journals.openedition.org/anneemaghreb/2446 [Accessed 28 November 2018] Cressey, P.G. (1932) The Taxi-Dance Hall: A Sociological Study in Commercialized Recreation and City Life. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press. Cressey, P.G. (1938) “The Motion Picture Experience as Modified by Social Background and Personality.” American Sociological Review 3: 244–230. Dibbets, K. (1980) Bioscoopketens in Nederland (1928–1977). Amsterdam: UvA. Fuller, K.H. (1996) At the Picture Show: Small-Town Audiences and the Creation of Movie Fan Culture. Charlottesville, VA: University Press of Virginia. Fuller-Seeley, K.H. (ed.) (2008) Hollywood in the Neighborhood: Historical Case Studies of Local Moviegoing. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Jowett, G., Jarvie, I., and Fuller, K. (1996) Children and the Movies. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press. Georg, O. (2015) Fantômas sous les tropiques: Aller au cinéma en Afrique colonial. Paris: Vendémaire. Ginzburg, C. (1993) “Microhistory: Two or Three Things That I Know about It.” Critical Inquiry 20(1): 10–35. Guback, T.H. (1969) The International Film Industry: Western Europe and America Since 1945. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Gomery, D. (1992) Shared Pleasures: A History of Movie Presentation in the United States. London: British Film Institute. Gondola, Ch.D. (2016) Tropical Cowboys: Westerns, Violence, and Masculinity in Kinshasa. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Grieveson, L. and Wasson, H. (eds.) (2008) Inventing Film Studies. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Ingersoll, E.G. (2016) Screening Woolf: Virginia Woolf on/and/in Film. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Klenotic, J. (1994) “The Place of Rhetoric in ‘New’ Film Historiography: The Discourse of Corrective Revisionism.” Film History 6(1), 45–58. Klinger, B. (1997) “Film History Terminable and Interminable: Recovering the Past in Reception Studies.” Screen 38: 107–128. Kuhn, A. (1999) “Memories of Cinemagoing in the 1930s.” Journal of Popular British Cinema 2: 100–120. Kuhn, A. (2002) An Everyday Magic: Cinema and Cultural Memory. London: I.B. Tauris. Lagny, M. (1994) “Film History: Or History Expropriated.” Film History 6(1): 26–44. Larkin, B. (2002) “The Materiality of Cinema Theaters in Northern Nigeria.” In F. Ginsburg, L. AbuLughod, and B. Larkin (eds.) Media Worlds: Anthropology on a New Terrain. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press (pp. 319–336). Le Roy Ladurie, E. (1979) The Territory of the Historian. Hassocks: Harvester Press, Leitch, Th. (2017) “Introduction.” In Th. Leitch (ed.) The Oxford Handbook of Adaptation Studies. New York, NY: Oxford University Press (pp. 1–20). Lewis, J. and Smoodin, E. (eds.) (2007) Looking Past the Screen. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Lynd, R.S. and Lynd, H.M. (1929/1956) Middletown: A Study in Modern American Culture. New York, NY: Harcourt. Maltby, R. (2006) “On the Prospect of Writing Cinema History from Below.” Tijdschrift voor Mediageschiedenis [ Journal for Media History] 9(2): 74–96. Maltby R. (2007) “How Can Cinema History Matter More?” Screening the Past 22. www.screening thepast.com/2015/01/how-can-cinema-history-matter-more/ [Accessed 28 November 2018] Maltby, R. (2011) “New Cinema Histories.” In Maltby, R., Biltereyst, D., and Meers, Ph. (eds.) Explorations in New Cinema History: Approaches and Case Studies. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell (pp. 3–40). Maltby, R. and Stokes, M. (eds.) (2004) Hollywood Abroad: Audiences and Cultural Exchange. London: BFI Publishing. Maltby, R., Biltereyst, D., and Meers, Ph. (eds.) (2011) Explorations in New Cinema History: Approaches and Case Studies. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell. Maltby, R., Stokes, M., and Allen, R.C. (eds.) (2007) Going to the Movies: Hollywood and the Social Experience of Cinema. Exeter: University of Exeter Press. Mayer, J.-P. (1945) Sociology of Film. London: Faber & Faber. Mayer, J.-P. (1948) British Cinemas and Their Audiences. London: Dobson.

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Daniel Biltereyst, Richard Maltby, and Philippe Meers Montebello, F. (1997) Spectacle cinématographique et classe ouvrière: Longwy 1944–1960. Lyon: ­LumièreLyon II. Moore, P. (2011) “The Social Biograph: Newspapers as Archives of the Regional Mass Market for Movies.” In Maltby, R. Biltereyst, D., and Meers, Ph. (eds.) Explorations in New Cinema History: Approaches and Case Studies. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell (pp. 263–279). Moran, A. and Aveyard, K. (eds.) (2013) Watching Films: New Perspectives on Movie-Going, Exhibition and Reception. Bristol: Intellect Books. Münsterberg, H. (1916) The Photoplay. New York, NY: Appleton. Napper, L. (2009) British Cinema and Middlebrow Culture in the Interwar Years. Exeter: Exeter University Press. Pisters, P. (2015) “De cinema.” In A. van den Oever, F. Kessler, P. Pisters, and S. Willemse (eds.) De beginjaren van de film en de tijd van de avant-garde. Nijmegen: In de Walvis (p. 15). Polan, D. (2007) Scenes of Instruction: The Beginnings of US Study of Film. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Richards, J. and Sheridan, D. (eds.) (1987/2016) Mass-Observation at the Movies. London: Routledge. Ricœur, P. (1999) “The Contribution of French Historiography to the Theory of History: The ­Zaharoff Lecture for 1978–9.” In The Annales School: Critical Assessments Volume II The Annales School and Historical Studies. London: Routledge (pp. 47–95). Rosenzweig, R. (2003) “Scarcity or Abundance? Preserving the Past in a Digital Era.” American Historical Review 108(3): 735–762. Sedgwick, J. (2000) Popular Filmgoing in 1930s Britain: A Choice of Pleasures. Exeter: University of ­Exeter Press. Stacey, J. (1994) Star Gazing: Hollywood Cinema and Female Spectatorship. London: Routledge. Staiger, J. (2000) Perverse Spectators: The Practice of Film Reception. New York, NY: New York University Press. Staiger, J. (2005) Media Reception Studies. New York, NY: New York University Press. Stokes, M. and Maltby, R. (eds.) (1999a) American Movie Audiences: From the Turn of the Century to the Early Sound Era. London: British Film Institute. Stokes, M. and Maltby, R. (eds.) (1999b) Identifying Hollywood’s Audiences: Cultural Identity and the ­Movies. London: British Film Institute. Stokes, M. and Maltby, R. (eds.) (2001) Hollywood Spectatorship: Changing Perceptions of Cinema Audiences. London: British Film Institute. Taylor, H. (1989) Scarlett’s Women: Gone with the Wind and Its Female Fans. London: Virago. Thissen, J. and Zimmerman, C. (eds.) (2016) Cinema Beyond the City: Small-Towns and Rural Film Culture in Europe. London: British Film Institute. Treveri Gennari, D., Hipkins, D., and O’Rawe, C. (eds.) (2018) Cinema Outside the City: Rural ­Cinema-Going from a Global Perspective. New York, NY: Palgrave. Trotter, D. (2007) Cinema and Modernism. Malden, MA: Blackwell. Verhoeven, D. (2012) “New Cinema History and the Computational Turn.” in WCCA 2012: “Beyond Art, Beyond Humanities, Beyond Technology: A New Creativity”, World Congress of Communication and the Arts Conference Proceedings, COPEC – Science and Education Research Council, [Guimarães, Portugal]. Waller, G.A. (1995) Main Street Amusements: Movies and Commercial Entertainment in a Southern City, 1896–1930, Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press. Waller, G.A. (ed.) (2002) Moviegoing in America: A Sourcebook in the History of Film Exhibition, Malden, MA: Blackwell. Woolf, V. (1926/1993) “The Cinema.” In R. Bowlby (ed.) The Crowded Dance of Modern Life. ­Harmondsworth: Penguin Books (pp. 54–57). [“The Cinema” was first published in the New York journal Arts, 26 June 1926; and then in Nation and Athenaeum, 6 July 1926.]

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Part I

Reflections and comments Introduction

New cinema history emerged as a term in 2007, in the conclusion of a conference on film cultures, film exhibition, and cinemagoing at Ghent University, but the “turn to the audience” in historical studies of cinema that it represented had developed in work published over the previous decade. The appearance of a descriptive term signaled that this body of work had reached a sufficient degree of methodological maturity and critical mass to acquire an identity and to represent a distinct set of methodological practices. New cinema history’s focus has very explicitly been not on films but on questions of the circulation and consumption of cinema – on the commercial activities of film distribution and exhibition and the political and legal matrix that underpinned them, and on the sociocultural history of cinema’s audiences. Its field of enquiry has been broad enough to generate a range of empirically based historical methodologies, from statistical analyses of box office economics to memory studies and oral history. In chapters in this opening part, some of the most prominent figures in the development of new cinema history’s approaches and discoveries describe their own practice and discuss their relation to the term. Consistent in all of their accounts is an acknowledgment of the diversity of the social experience of cinema and a concomitant resistance to compress that diversity into a single overarching account of “the cinema audience.” The first two chapters take the form of interviews with Robert C. Allen and Annette Kuhn. Robert Allen’s pioneering work in film historiography, audience studies, and digital humanities has inspired much of the work in new cinema history. In conversation with two of this book’s editors, he discusses the relationship between cinema history and social history and the historical importance of cinema as a cultural phenomenon and social practice. Using his current work on early cinema in North Carolina as a source of examples, he highlights the interpretative risks involved in either retrospectively imposing “the teleology of cinema” onto past practices or generalizing from specific microhistorical instances. Allen argues that the increasing availability of digitized newspapers offers unprecedented opportunities to create “a historiography that is zoomable,” achieving both a high degree of granularity and a broader comparison of exhibition and audience practices. These sources also reveal the extent to which the experience of cinema has been interconnected with the experience of other forms, leading him to suggest that the abundance of digitized material now available should

Reflections and comments

encourage the “new new cinema history” to pursue “discovery, serendipity and the asking of new questions,” rather than attempting to force new discoveries into a single ­narrative or generalization. Annette Kuhn’s ethnohistorical studies of audiences’ experiences of cinema have been central to the growing body of research into the role of cinema in people’s daily lives and to the application of the methodologies of ethnography, oral history, and memory studies to cinema history. In discussion with Daniel Biltereyst, Kuhn explains the development of her empirical research practice, emerging from a dissatisfaction with feminist film theory’s conflation of the “spectator-in-the-text” with the social audience and the related need to investigate what historical audiences actually thought. She explores her continuing interest in psychoanalysis as a means of understanding cultural experience, and her abiding engagement with the idea of home and its relation to cinema and photography. Arguing that memory studies have a central place in new cinema history’s concern with the experience of cinemagoing, Kuhn sees opportunities for memory work on the existing research data that have been made publicly available, such as Melvyn Stokes’ project on cinemagoing in 1960s Britain. Stokes’ own chapter charts his academic and intellectual journey as a new cinema historian, his organization of two pivotal conferences on the history of cinema audiences and exhibition at University College London in 1998 and 2003, and his co-editorship of the five books that emanated from those conferences and were key publications in establishing new cinema history as a distinct practice. Like his magisterial 2007 account of the production and reception of D.W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation (D.W. Griffith Corporation, 1915), these books were predominantly concerned with audiences for American cinema, but his more recent work with Matthew Jones, Emma Pett, and Patrick Glen on cultural memory and British cinemagoing in the 1960s has extended Kuhn’s research on 1930s audiences into not only a new period but also new practices in community engagement. John Caughie’s chapter also reflects on a large-scale funded research project, in this case examining early cinema in Scotland, and like Allen, Caughie’s project has been committed to exploring the complexity of the data available to it, rather than synthesizing those data into a linear argument. His chapter is, in part, a meditation on the extent to which new cinema history refuses the “ordered perspectives” of such narrative paradigms as the modernity thesis or classical cinema, through the sheer disorderly quantity of the information it provides on audience behaviors and subjectivities. His investigation of cinema in five small Scottish towns has revealed their differences not only from the cinema of the major cities but also from each other. Like Allen’s study of North Carolina, Caughie reveals the extent to which the integration of variety performances with cinema persisted as an intermedial form and as “a participatory and active experience rather than an experience of consumption” for its local audiences. The diversity of Caughie’s examples insists, however, on the contingency and specificity of local experience. In the final chapter in this part, Gregory Waller examines another aspect of the contingent, local circumstance of cinema exhibition by exploring the question of whether there can be a new nontheatrical cinema history. Waller understands nontheatrical cinema to be an inclusive but not rigidly defined category covering “the public sites and occasions of film screenings beyond the movie theater” (Lucie Česálková provides another model for classifying noncommercial screenings in Chapter 24). Using the deployment of motion pictures by churches in the United States during the 1910s and 1920s as an example, he explores the extent to which the assumptions and practices of new cinema history can be applied to

14

Reflections and comments

this other mode of exhibition, finding plentiful opportunities for microhistorical enquiry, but – and again in keeping with Allen and Caughie’s conclusions – noting that the aggregated ­information drawn from such accounts “will not lead to a fine-grained, authoritative overview or to quantitatively demonstrable claims about how motion pictures were used by churches.” Waller also considers the extent to which church and Sunday school screenings constituted an “experience of cinema,” and the lack of concentration among nontheatrical distribution companies, despite the scale of the market for religious films.

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1 Connections, intermediality, and the anti-archive A conversation with Robert C. Allen Richard Maltby and Philippe Meers Robert C. Allen is one of the pioneers of the empirical study of cinema and film history (e.g. Allen, 1979), often referred to as “revisionist film history” since the mid-1980s. His 1985 book Film History: Theory and Practice with Douglas Gomery (Allen and Gomery, 1985) was a landmark in film historiography and still guides many a cinema and film historian. ­Besides his well-known work on television soap opera (Allen, 1985, 1994), Allen has inspired generations of film historians. His debate with Ben Singer in Cinema Journal on the composition of nickelodeon audiences in Manhattan is legendary by now (Singer, 1995; Allen, 1996). In a seminal 1990 article in Screen (Allen, 1990), he launched an agenda for decades of historical audience studies, while in two articles in the 2000s, he articulated the empirical and the geographical turn in cinema studies (Allen, 2006a, 2006b). With Richard Maltby and Melvyn Stokes, he also co-edited one volume (2007) in their groundbreaking series, which points the way to a more contextual and audience-centered cinema studies. Besides his theoretical and conceptual contributions, Allen equally remains at the forefront of ­cutting-edge technological and methodological innovations in the field of cinema and film history, demonstrating how the methods and materials of digital humanities can stimulate new research questions and new ways of engaging with the audiences for cinema history. It comes as no surprise then that his pioneering digital cinema history project “Going to the Show” (2009)1 received the American Historical Association’s Rosenzweig Award for Innovation in Digital History. In the following conversation with Richard Maltby and Philippe Meers, at the H ­ oMER@NECS conference in Potsdam in July 2016,2 Allen covers various key issues for the field of (new) cinema history.

Cinema history and/as social history: connections Richard Maltby (hereafter RM):  In 2004, Richard Abel suggested that the work that

you and others researching the role that moving pictures played in peoples’ lives succeeded more as social history than as cinema history (Abel, 2004). As your work has developed over the last five years, has it become much more social history and not necessarily related to cinema directly? 16

Connections, intermediality, and anti-archive Robert C. Allen (hereafter RCA):  My “research” very much aligns with and supports

other dimensions of my scholarly practice, rather than being a historiographic end in itself. As a result the questions I’m asking about “cinema” and the use I’m making of the answers to those questions change, depending upon the courses I’m teaching and public humanities projects I’m working on. In a class on the development of “modern” urban space in the South, I might assign my students to focus on an aspect of cinema history that can be explored only by searching millions of pages of digitized newspapers. Their findings reveal the complex and sometimes surprising roles that cinema and c­inema venues played in everyday life in dozens of towns in the early days of the twentieth century. By posting their findings and the questions those findings provoke on the class website, my students quite literally “become” cinema historians. Their understanding of the dynamics of early cinema is deeper and more nuanced than any generalizations I might make in a lecture or in a journal essay I might assign them to read. I’ve said this any number of times before, but it bears repeating: I think we’ve both underestimated and overestimated the importance of cinema. We have tended to overestimate how much individual films have “mattered” to most audiences and individuals, particularly at the height of the Hollywood era, when a given film might have been available only for a few days, and was followed by another film’s three-day run, and so forth. Furthermore, as I have noted, well into the twentieth century in the U.S. many more people lived in or near small towns than larger urban areas. Many of those small towns could only support a single dedicated cinema venue, so audience members might have read about particular films or particular stars, but they were able to experience them only if the theater manager was able to book them. On the other hand, we have grossly underestimated the magnitude of cinema as a social and a cultural phenomenon. If you regard cinema as being the sum total of all of the instantiations of that term in some way, somewhere, it would take someone who has greater math skills than mine to even come up with the back of the envelope estimate of the billions and billions of instantiations of cinema. Each of those is an event. Each of those represents an experience. The fact that until very recently instantiations of cinema have not been very well documented in the most easily accessible sources does not undermine the larger historiographic observation that cinema was really important as a social practice, as a cultural phenomenon. In most small towns in North America, cinema was the first regular, nationally circulated form of theatrical culture that came into communities, and the first one to also be available at the retail level, so they occupied these economic niches within communities, which opera houses and vaudeville in small towns never had. The challenge is to honor and to do justice to this phenomenon, cinema, in ways that make sense and that continue to be relevant to the eighteen- to twenty-year-old young people who walk into our classes. RM:  Abel’s words imply a terminological divide, as if cinema history is separate from social and cultural history; if you talk about social and cultural issues, then you are not talking about the film. While there is more openness now towards these non-textual issues, is there still an underlying implicit hierarchy that what is real film studies is talking about the film? RCA:  First of all, I think this is a false dichotomy: there is no “film” that can be disconnected from the social and cultural connections of which it is a part – whether that film was shown a hundred years ago or last week. One of the things that the new cinema history should do is revisit, re-interrogate the foundational terms of cinema studies, including the definition of cinema itself. I am looking at Gilles Deleuze and his interpreters for some guidance here in trying to think about cinema in terms of relationships and 17

Robert C. Allen

connections (see e.g. Rajchman, 2014). Deleuze talks about “and before is.” What he means is that if we agree that what we’re looking at is a complex set of connections and complex sets of relationships, we can’t assume that the terms of these relationships precede the relations themselves. And I think in looking at early cinema through the lens of these millions of pages of North Carolina newspapers, thousands of pages published between 1896 and 1906; you can see cinema “becoming” a set of relations before there is a cinema which can serve as a term for those relations. In a recent course called “Documenting Communities,” I had my students try to find the very first instance of cinema in the small North Carolina town they “adopted” for research purposes for the semester. Invariably, cinema was introduced to the people in these communities by a traveling showman. Part of the cultural “work” being done by newspaper advertisements and commentary for these shows was to try to establish what cinema “was.” What this meant was to make connections between “cinema” (about which prospective audiences knew little) and other experiences with which they were more familiar. This is where the role of religious performance in spreading early cinema in North Carolina was a real revelation. Arthur Butt, who gave the first cinema shows in a lot of towns and cities in North Carolina, was not some young twenty-year-old ­photographer who bought a projector and went out. He had been touring as an evangelist, a singer, giving religious shows for a quarter of a century. So when he came to a town, he didn’t come as a cinema exhibitor, but by the same token, he was not a stranger. So people knew what he was. So in the newspapers, what he does is referred to as “an entertainment.” I would argue that the kind of exploration and interpretation my students were ­doing – which led us serendipitously to making connections between religious practice and cinematic practice – is not the same thing as locating cinema within the social and cultural context of the turn of the century. The danger of working from the object/ context model, says Deleuze, is the tendency to back-project a context onto that object (a film, let’s say, or a practice such as itinerant exhibition) so that the object comes to have significance and historiographic and epistemological valance in relation to this pre-established context that we already know. This is a logical and conceptual conundrum, because that object cannot have meaning outside of some context against which it is projected. Deleuze calls that “judgment.” We should suspend our judgment. If we are looking at early cinema, it is not productive to take the career of an early itinerant showman and rear-project the teleology of cinema onto it, so that he becomes this archaic, romantic figure who will soon be made obsolete. When my students are finding newspaper articles and are trying to make sense of them, one of the ways they don’t make sense of them is by plugging them into the standard canonical narratives of cinema history, because they don’t know them. What they are able to do is to make connections between what they are finding and their own media experiences. One student asked if the first storefront theaters were kind of like “pop-up” shops. RM:  Are “microhistories” something else we should be moving away from? RCA:  Microhistory has not had the kind of purchase in the States that it has in Europe. And, yes, I do think it runs the risk of being a version of the object/context conundrum, in which you find an instance about which you have some evidence and you write about it in great detail, either to make the case that you can see in this instance something that confirms a larger explanation you’ve already made or that it is significant because it “complicates” that explanation. It helps, I think, to rethink the notion of the historiographic scale at which we are working. And Google Maps help us a lot by providing 18

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a spatial correlative to a conceptual re-mapping of the relationship of things relevant to cinemagoing on somewhere at some time. We need a historiography that is zoomable, that can zoom in to a high degree of granularity, but we operate with the recognition that when we do zoom in to that high degree of granularity, and it fills the screen as it were, it’s obscuring a whole lot of other things. We then also need to be able to zoom out, and to be able to connect. Not the small with the large, but the here with the there. Philippe Meers (hereafter PM):  Are you talking about comparative research then? RCA:  Yes, but perhaps in a way that complicates what we mean by “comparative.” It starts by asserting that everything is connected to everything else. Furthermore, we must pay attention to the constitution of the instances of cinema that we’re ­comparing to one another and resist the temptation to reduce them each to a comparable s­ ingularity based on seemingly shared traits that might or might not be determinative – ­comparing the experience of “cinema” in a Scottish town of 2,000 with a town in North Carolina of 2,000, for example. Or even such a “small” town in North C ­ arolina with one in Iowa. Internal differences and particularities might render the basis of c­ omparison – ­population – irrelevant. There are a number of towns in North Carolina with populations of 2,000 in 1910 that had an effective cinemagoing population of 1,200 or less because African A ­ mericans made up 40 percent of the total population but were excluded from all cinema venues. The social practice of racial exclusion and the ideological position of white supremacy upon which it was based could have retarded the establishment and growth of cinema in towns in different populations, even if they worked against economic rationales. This realization would drive me more deeply into the sets of relationships at work in such towns and the development of strategies and practices that emerged from them. For example, having a large percentage of African Americans in a Southern town might have spurred an exhibitor to seek out a venue that could accommodate a balcony and the attendant architectural structures of racial segregation. We have also found instances of early cinema exhibitors operating a whites-only theater downtown and a theater for African Americans in the town’s black neighborhood. This had the effect of increasing the size of the moviegoing audience in the town (and total income for the exhibitor), while safeguarding the whites-only policy for the downtown theater. The availability of digitized pre-1923 local newspapers in the US – and, increasingly in other countries – makes it much easier for a researcher to examine relationships and practices within and across communities, taking advantage of synchronicities (the number of communities nearby and far away with newspaper coverage at a particular time) and diachronic “depth” (communities that have long continuous runs of one or more newspapers extending across decades). We can now “compare” sets of practices within and across the sites in which these practices played out quite literally on a daily basis and across a cinemagoing generation. The unprecedented access to long runs of newspapers for towns large and small across vast distances productively complicates making generalizations or comparisons about a particular time period or a particular geographical/political sphere. The histories of “American” cinema written to this point – where such histories have dealt with exhibition, reception, and public discourse about cinema at all – have by necessity relied upon trade papers and the relatively few general circulation newspapers available to researchers in any one given place. In the microfilm era, even the best-resourced university libraries in the US subscribed to long runs of a few metropolitan newspapers (which were the most likely to have been preserved and commercialized in microfilm form 19

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by ProQuest and other providers), and large-circulation newspapers from their state or region. This is a classic instance of the “old” data landscape of scarcity and remoteness. But there is a danger of these limited sources becoming a sort of epistemological echo chamber: even before the advent of wire services, newspapers, particularly large ones, frequently ran stories from other large papers around the country, creating the impression of national awareness and salience of particular issues, events and controversies. Furthermore, with multiple daily metropolitan newspapers (and press barons) ­competing for circulation and advertising revenue, sensationalism was a common ­strategy for attracting attention and readership, thus creating a megaphone effect. But we now also have the ability to reach into thousands of localities to see if, for example, controversies in Chicago and New York over cinema content and venues between, let’s say, 1905 and 1910, were reflected in local newspaper editorials and exhibition practice. I’ve explored this question in a class exercise, by having my students search for local newspaper coverage in North Carolina papers of one of the most “notorious films” of this era: The Unwritten Law (Lubin, 1907). Thanks to the digitization of all pre-1923 North Carolina newspapers by our library, my students could search twenty or more local papers simultaneously and by the end of a ninety-minute class come up with a counter-hypothesis to the national “moral hysteria” account based primarily on metropolitan newspapers. In the first place, we learned, The Unwritten Law only played in a handful of cities in North Carolina, and in only one (my hometown of Gastonia, N.C., as it happens!) was there negative response to the showing of the film or an attempt by municipal authorities to prevent the showing of the film. There were thousands of mentions of “The Unwritten Law” in 1907 and 1908 in local newspapers, but o ­ verwhelmingly they referred to the “natural law” principle from which the film took its name: that a husband was within his rights to murder his wife’s lover if he caught them in the act. This “unwritten law” was used in the Harry Thaw murder case upon which the film was based, but was invoked as a quasi-legal principle in d­ ozens and d­ ozens of widely reported cases from Birmingham to Belgium. ­Furthermore, there were no campaigns mounted against storefront theaters in these towns in North ­Carolina. Might a similar experiment based on newspapers in another state or region of the country have produced different findings? Of course, but a countervailing finding does not “prove” the case for a national cinema hysteria, or refute my students’ findings for North ­Carolina. But a different account would suggest the need for further examination of social and cultural practices and structures in these towns as well as “comparative” study across other locales in relation to particular practices. The source material that is now available through digital means supports discovery, serendipity, and the asking of new questions much more easily than it supports the drive toward abstraction and generalization. We are still at the point where we need to be making connections. This has historiographic priority for me, particularly in relation to the current data-state of cinema history, over any attempt to corral these serendipitous discoveries, or hard-wire connections into a single narrative or generalization. Again, “and” before “is.” PM:  One of the ambitions of new cinema history was to go beyond the classical ­European/ American analysis, narrative, history. Are we still working within a very Anglo-­ Eurocentric frame? RCA:  The largest and most accessible data sources are still Anglo-centric and US-centric, but this is quickly changing. I am thinking of Ancestry.com here, with its tens of billions of primary source records, which, through its Newspapers.com subsidiary has 20

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been instrumental in the digitization of our North Carolina newspapers. But the international scope of digitized source material relevant to cinema history is expanding enormously. Take newspapers, for example, In Australia you have Trove.3 There are newspaper digitization efforts going on in just about every country in Europe, in ­Singapore and Malaysia. That is going to eventually change the scale and granularity of comparative work. We no longer have to constitute Antwerp as the place, the thing that we compare to someplace else, but we will be able to see the variety and differences that may create new connections that we couldn’t see before, but also help us to resist the temptation to reduce Antwerp to Antwerp. RM:  Thinking back to the first London conference,4 I think there was quite a lot of methodological innovation in the first decade of new cinema history. Has there been rather less since then? RCA:  Your comment speaks to the rather curious institutional and academic place that we in the new cinema history occupy. It is work that continues to be located at the margins of film studies, but not at the center of any other discipline. One way of looking at what work has been done over the last decade and a half is asking what is the richness, diversity, and effectivity of this “work at the margins”? I would ask, “Where have we made an intervention? Have these interventions been provocative of new kinds of work?” As scholars come to terms with the full implications of working in a data environment of ubiquity and hyper-abundance, they also come to terms with the advantages and complications of working in project-focused research teams rather than as individuals. This, in itself, is something many scholars in the humanities are not trained or accustomed to do. They are also trying to figure out the best ways of representing the findings of their research, and realizing that the academic monograph or scholarly journal article has serious limitations. They are discovering the advantages and complications of working with colleagues who come not from other disciplines but from other domains of knowledge and practice – computer programmers, for example. And, finally, they are discovering that they frequently need material support for their projects beyond that usually available to an individual scholar from his or own department. So, I would say that scholars who would identify their work as being consonant with that of the new cinema history movement and some of its key characteristics – collaborative, project-based, open-ended, innovative – have joined the ranks of other humanists and social scientists trying to reinvent their disciplines. Sometimes, “how” we do our work is of as much interest and value to our colleagues in other fields as the direct objects of that work. For example, although I was not allowed to read the evaluations of the selection committee for the American Historical Association’s Rosenzweig Prize for Innovation in Digital History, I strongly suspect that our use of what were then innovative and generalizable representational strategies: georeferenced historical map layers, timelines, text annotation, etc. scored us a lot more points than the research question that stimulated the project to begin with: “Where and under what conditions did cinema come to towns and cities in North Carolina?”

Intermediality PM:  Can students, being digital natives, now more easily understand the concept of

intermediality? RCA:  In looking at the early period of exhibition and storefront theaters you can see, at the

level of individual performances from town to town, exhibitor to exhibitor, showman 21

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to showman, the way in which film is, from the very beginning and for a very long time, incorporated into a performance-mode that is itself intermedial. In part that was a necessity given the formal structures of cinematic texts in 1896–1898. They were so short that it was very difficult to rely upon some number of them filling out an entire program. The projection-devices that showmen were using anticipated intermediality; that is, they could be used to show stereopticon slides as well as films, and that became very important as a way of constructing a program. But I have also become much more aware of the role of live performance, particularly music and of singing as a part of “cinematic” performance. One of the exhibitors that we are looking at, Arthur Butt, was himself a professional evangelical singer and choir director. So, not just music but vocal performance was a part of the experience of “cinema” that he offered. He was also a noted painter and interpreter of religious panoramas – an entertainment form that predated the movies by decades. In some cases, movies and panorama alternated daily in performance, and in other cases they shared the same bill. Indeed, live, vocal performance of music was commonly a part of the experience of “cinema” wherever I’ve looked in the period between the establishment of the first storefront theaters around 1906 and the advent of feature films a half dozen years later. We have assumed that musical instrumentation was added to “cinema” venues to accompany individual films. However, I think there is a case to be made that an alternative (and in many cases prior) use for the piano in a storefront theater was to accompany the “illustrator”: the local vocal artist who accompanied the illustrated songs performed between reels. In some cases, we’ve found that the illustrator received higher billing than films that were also to be on the program. PM:  Intermediality is usually associated with the early and the contemporary periods. Is the concept also relevant for the classical era? RCA:  As we develop and explore richer archives of newspapers and other sources, we will discover that this complex web of connections between the experience of cinema and the experience of other forms is a lot more prevalent than we imagined. And we just have to have a willingness to displace the cinema text from the foreground of our historiographic vision to allow these other forms to come to the fore. For example, I’m fascinated right now by the complex relationship between the passion plays of the late 1890s and the production and circulation of filmic versions of the passion play year after year to the same towns. This would be very difficult to find using microfilm newspapers, because you are looking for one performance of the passion play a year. But if you have them digitized you can find them. So you can see their evergreen nature. The passion play itself is a pageant, so it’s the film of the pageant. There is no attempt at verisimilitude here. Realism doesn’t enter into the picture. But today, when scholars write about the passion play films, they talk about them as antiquarian oddities, because their staging is so theatrical. Well, it is a film of a pageant and the pageant is about the most important story in Christianity, which has been performed across multiple forms for centuries. This instance of intermediality opens up a different kind of reception, that we might call devotional, which opens up all kinds of other fascinating questions.

Practice versus reception RCA:  One of the things that pushes me towards a notion of cinemagoing as practice rather

than as reception is the fact that across cinema history evidence of the former is easier to find than the latter. Certainly, there are some really important exceptions. For example, 22

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Melvyn Stokes (2007) might well be interested in going back and doing all the wonderful work he has already done on The Birth of a Nation (D.W. Griffith Corporation, 1915) with the luxury of having digitized source material at his disposal. He could document the circulation of this film not only in its original distribution in 1915, but all the times that it came back, particularly to the South, over the course of the rest of the century. I did some research in the North Carolina newspapers on Birth of a Nation. It only played in the largest cities in the state: Charlotte, Greensboro, Raleigh, Wilmington, and Durham. But its influence was much greater in a cultural and geographic sense. For the first time, digitized newspapers allow us to register this influence. We found, for example, notices in small-town newspapers showing that white middle-class residents of outlying small towns made a pilgrimage to see the film. Now, we can actually map the effect of this film in terms of its circulation in a way that we would never have been able to do before digitization. RM:  I’m curious about what one could do with a notion of indifferent reception, when you go to the movies on Thursday night, because that’s what you do on a Thursday night, and you see whatever’s on, but you are in a sense indifferent to the individual film. RCA:  You can listen for unusual instances of reception, both by what is said and what is not said, where you might expect there to be ministers decrying a particular film, or editors calling for it to be banned, or police chiefs – as they did in some kind of communities – literally exercising prior restraint by prohibiting a film from being shown. You are faced with what you expect to be evidence of reception, and if you don’t find it, that is as significant as finding it, because it says that it fits within the terms of the possible. PM:  And it also depends on the kind of cinema you’re looking for. Arthur Knight (2011) searches for a black audience cinema in Williamsburg and doesn’t find any trace. RCA:  One of the things that I ask my students to look for is evidence of whether or not African Americans were a part of the emergent audience for something that became cinema in the early part of the twentieth century. They were really frustrated because they didn’t see anything, and wondered whether, since they didn’t see in the ads an explicit prohibition against African Americans attending, that this meant they did attend. I had to tell them that all my research and personal experience suggests that this is an instance of what Edward Said (1978) talks about as the silence of power here. In other words, what this discursive absence probably meant was that Jim Crow’s segregation was so deeply embedded in these communities that its explicit articulation – in discourse – was not necessary. It is still a part of discourse and is still a part of the discourse of cinema. It’s just that it is silence that structures that discourse, rather than being an explicit instance if it.

Data and the anti-archive RM:  Can we talk about data, and the shift from an economy of scarcity to one of abundance,

and how this changes what we do? RCA:  It fundamentally changes the relationship to what we think we know as the archive

in a number of ways. It moves us from the notion of a landscape of data scarcity where the data is rare, if not unique, and in an archive somewhere you are not, so that you have a limited opportunity to engage with that data and to pull something from it. In the past, you could be pretty sure that you were going to be the only person to have actually looked at that data and made generalizations about it. If I’m a casual reader of your work, I’m probably not going to hop on a plane to Los Angeles to track down a reference in a footnote, right? 23

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Now, we take each one of those characteristics of the data landscape and turn it on its head. All of a sudden, we’re not dealing with an archive, we’re dealing with an anti-­ archive. It is so huge and so undefinable, and produced not in relation to a fixed object of study like cinema, but in relation to all kinds of stuff. And yet, our challenge is to ask questions for which that data become relevant. This means that the research skills that we teach our students have to be different, they have to be in relation to a very different archival landscape. They are looking at primary source material, not secondary cinema texts, and they’re asking “What is this? What can I do with this? What does this mean?” That anti-archive is extraordinarily uneven. There is no data-utopia. For some things, it is incredibly rich, richer than we can comprehend. This might mean that we have to go where the data are, rather than conceiving a question about a filmmaker, a place or whatever, and then looking for the data to support it. Instead, we look to see where there are data, and then we look to see what questions we can ask of that data. It means that we are dealing with a different data-economy. We are accustomed to dealing with archives that are at universities or museums. A lot of the data that we will be using for cultural social history and for cinema studies may have been gathered for reasons that are not academic at all, but trying to sell subscriptions to people who are trying to find out the name of their great-grandfather. And to say: “No, that’s somehow tainted because it was developed by a commercial enterprise,” is cutting off our nose to spite our face. As I have said, this new data landscape calls for discovery and serendipity. Traditionally, models of archival research punish serendipity. We have all been in the situation of looking at a microfilm newspaper. We are looking for X, and we are scrolling through, not finding X, but there is this fascinating article just to the right of the one that we wish was there, and we say, “we’re going to have to make another project and go back and look at,” and you can’t. Not unless you put your current project on pause and go back and reproduce the same process in relation to a new object of study. But today you can say: “Oh, John Butt, the father of early traveling exhibitor, Arthur Butt shows up 700 times in more than two dozen local North Carolina newspapers over a twenty-five-year span.” He was a traveling minister – a “circuit rider” as it was called. We can then ask the question, “Did Arthur Butt ever travel with his father?” In the microfilm age, this would have been meant taking hundreds of hours to read back through hundreds of accounts. Today, it is a matter of searching for newspaper articles and advertisements in which both “Arthur Butt” and “John Butt” appear. But the importance of this serendipity is not just that Arthur, in part, at least, learned his performance craft from his father, but that the idea of an itinerant performance “circuit” would have been something Arthur had direct experience of long before he touched a movie projector. This, in turn, suggests that we think more about the relationship between religious “entertainment” and cinematic entertainment in the early years of commercial cinema. The kind of work from which these serendipities arise is quite different for my students from the way I was trained. Digital research requires different skills and encourages a different understanding of the past. It also rewards crowdsourcing and collaboration. The other issue about data and the digital is the opportunity to connect what we do in cinema history with communities and the memories of people in those communities. A lot of this new primary source material is not trade papers published on a national scale, but material that comes out of local communities and reflects local practices and social structures. This is a nod in the direction of Annette Kuhn and her work (see Chapter 2), but it is a little bit beyond that in recognizing even more local expertise and 24

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local knowledge as being important to what we do in cinema studies. For instance, there is an itinerant filmmaker in North Carolina named H. Lee Waters who was a photographer in the depression. He bought a movie camera in 1937, and he went around to mill towns and he shot of what he called “films of local people.” He would line up the entire student body of a high school and get them on the screen. The idea was to get as many faces on the screen as possible. He processed the film, came back two weeks later, and arranged with the theater manager to split the proceeds. The advertising splashed on his truck was “See yourself as others see you!” One of the films that he did late in his career in 1942 was a color film of Gastonia shot in the same Loray mill village where my colleagues and I in the Community Histories Workshop are working on an adaptive-reuse historical preservation project. Duke University has about seventy of Waters’ films, and they agreed to do a very high-quality digital copy of the Gastonia film. In April 2016, we organized the first screening of the film since it was shot and originally screened at the mill village theater in 1942. We set up a makeshift cinema venue in a vacant space in the Loray Mill as a part of a “history open house.” We had planned for 75 people and wound up having two screenings of more than a hundred people each. In introducing the film, I asked that if anyone in the audience recognized someone in the film to please raise their hand. Five minutes into the film, a woman stood up, pointed at the screen and said, “That’s my mother!” This little experiment provokes us to ask how we can use such “local” films in a way that returns them to the communities from which they came and takes advantage of a local expertise that we as scholars will never possess. Thanks to one of our graduate students, Melissa Dollman, we are working on a way to tag people who are recognized, collect metadata about them, and add both to the “film” itself. I think that dealing with these questions of representation in relation to the data that we have and the films that we have represents one of the most exciting challenges of cinema history, and does make it very relevant.

Pedagogy RCA:  The first question to ask about pedagogy is why we are doing it. Why do we teach

cinema, to whom do we teach it and what do we think is its relevance and importance? We have to ask that question as teachers and as scholars, because of the perilous position and situation of the humanities, at least in the United States, in which the question “why do we teach what we teach in humanities” is no longer something that can be taken for granted. If we want to continue to do this work, we have to be in a position to speak to constituencies that we’re not used to addressing – state legislators, donors, alumni, parents, students – to make the case that doing this is important, and that it aligns with institutional priorities. I think there is an opportunity here to engage students in a new kind of historical inquiry, the significance and importance of which exceed whatever they learned about a particular instance of cinema, and that developing those skills and competencies is actually vocationally important. It is a way of preparing them for working in the world, because they’re going to be spending a lot of time having to make relevant some of the enormous amount of data that they confront on a daily basis. This kind of engagement with primary source material and with new cinema history also really encourages collaboration and group work. There’s an opportunity for a cinema studies class to become a laboratory, and for it to be organized much more around experimentation than we’re used to talking about in the humanities. The teacher is no 25

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longer standing in front of the class with a set of lecture notes that he pulls out of the briefcase from three years before and gives them the story of what happened to cinema. Rather, it’s setting up a research environment – opportunities for project work, connecting what students do in class and in “archival” research projects to the communities to which this research is related. This kind of work also encourages a different way of representing student work and creating a wider audience for it. Creating a blog post is a much more rewarding and effective process than writing a term paper. The reader can quite literally see the same newspaper ad, historical map, film, or census enumeration that the student based his or her historical account upon. Students can immediately “see” what everyone else in the class is doing, and they can learn from each other new strategies for creating digital projects. PM:  How long can we go on calling new cinema history new, or should we not have called it new in the first place? RCA:  I spoke at the 2015 Arclight Conference in Montreal about what’s new in cinema history, or the new new cinema history. The point I wanted to make was that cinema history has always been open to the use of new technologies as both ways of doing research and representing that research. I think the new new cinema history – new cinema history 2.0 – would be the full engagement with that, in taking on board all of the differences that working in a digital world ourselves and with our students would make, and what challenges and opportunities that would represent. That is the direction, I think, for the new new cinema history.

Notes 1 See http://gtts.oasis.unc.edu/index.html. 2 The History of Moviegoing, Exhibition and Reception Network (HoMER) has collaborated at various occasions with the European Network for Cinema and Media Studies (NECS), organizing autonomously selected panels within the NECS conferences. 3 Trove is an initiative of the National Library of Australia. Its digitized newspaper collection is freely available at http://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/. 4 The London 2003 Commonwealth Fund Conference on American History, held at UCL in June, was devoted to “American Cinema and Everyday Life.”

References Abel, R. (2004) “History Can Work for You, If You Know How to Use It.” Cinema Journal 44(1): 107–112. Allen, R.C. (1979) “Motion Picture Exhibition in Manhattan, 1906–1912: Beyond the Nickelodeon.” Cinema Journal 19(2): 2–15. Allen, R.C. (1985) Speaking of Soap Operas. Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press. Allen, R.C. (1990) “From Exhibition to Reception: Reflections on the Audience in Film History.” Screen 31(4): 347–365. Allen, R.C. (ed.) (1994) To Be Continued…: Soap Operas around the World. London: Routledge. Allen, R.C. (1996) “Manhattan Myopia: Or, Oh! Iowa!” Cinema Journal 35(3): 75–103. Allen, R.C. (2006a) “Relocating American Film History. The ‘Problem’ of the Empirical.” Cultural Studies 20(1): 62–63. Allen, R.C. (2006b) “The Place of Space in Film Historiography.” Tijdschrift voor Mediageschiedenis 9(2): 19–20. Allen, R.C. and Gomery, D. (1985) Film History: Theory and Practice. Boston, MA: McGraw-Hill.

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Connections, intermediality, and anti-archive Knight, A. (2011) “Searching for the Apollo. Black Moviegoing and Its Contexts in the Small Town US South.” In R. Maltby, D. Biltereyst, and Ph. Meers (eds.) Explorations in New Cinema History: Approaches and Case Studies. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell (pp. 226–242). Maltby, R., Stokes, M., and Allen, R.C. (eds.) (2007) Going to the Movies. Hollywood and the Social Experience of Cinema. Exeter: University of Exeter Press. Rajchman, J. (2014) Deleuze Connections. Cambridge: MIT Press. Said, E. (1978) Orientalism. New York, NY: Pantheon Books. Singer, B. (1995) “Manhattan Nickelodeon: New Data on Audiences and Exhibitors.” Cinema Journal 34(3): 5–35. Stokes, M. (2007) D.W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation: A History of “The Most Controversial Motion Picture of All Time.” Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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2 Film history, cultural memory, and the experience of cinema A conversation with Annette Kuhn Daniel Biltereyst Annette Kuhn’s An Everyday Magic: Cinema and Cultural Memory (2002) is among the most frequently cited works in new cinema history, particularly within the growing field of research dealing with audiences’ past experiences of film and cinema.1 Kuhn’s pioneering study of cinemagoing and cinema culture in Britain in the 1930s (see also 1999a, 1999b) continues to inspire scholars who wish to understand, or want to investigate, the remembered experience of cinemagoing or how films affected those who saw them.2 In her “ethnohistorical study” of the “picturegoing heyday of the 1930s generation” (Kuhn, 2002: 3, 7), Kuhn’s subtle and imaginative analysis of cinema in people’s daily lives is based on a methodologically ambitious and rigorous research design. Her multiscopic approach, detailed in a long appendix to An Everyday Magic (Kuhn, 2002: 240–254), freely combines interviews, questionnaires, and other informant-generated material (such as people’s letters and essays describing their favorite cinemas, stars, or films) with contemporary source materials including fan magazines, the popular press, official reports and surveys, as well as films themselves. Although An Everyday Magic explores questions of spectatorship, femininity, child development, and other issues that had been tackled in Kuhn’s previous work in film and feminist theory, it also introduces concepts, methods, and protocols – interpretive sociology, oral history, ethnography, memory studies – that have since come to inform “new” fields within film studies. In the following interview, which was conducted in her London apartment in S­ eptember 2016, Annette Kuhn reconstructs her career as a scholar and revisits some of the themes which have been important in her historiographic work on cinema’s past. What emerges is that Kuhn’s scholarship can be characterized as an unbound adventurous exploration (call it multidisciplinarity) and a continuous reworking of her earlier insights on the role of visual and popular culture and its place in people’s lives (dialectic self-criticism). In 2014, Screen established the Annette Kuhn Essay Award in recognition of her contribution not only to the journal itself, but, more importantly, to the development of film and screen studies and theory.3 Kuhn, who is now Emeritus Professor in Film Studies at Queen Mary University of London and a Fellow of the British Academy, is recognized as one of the leading scholars in the field, with important contributions to feminist film studies and feminist theory (e.g. Kuhn, 1982; Kuhn and Radstone, 1990; Kuhn and Wolpe, 1978); to film analysis and genre theory (e.g. Kuhn, 1990, 1999c); as well as to research on and theories of film spectatorship, 28

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reception, and audiences. Kuhn’s role in developing audience-oriented film studies is linked to the fact that she was among the first within feminist film studies to use ethnographic methodologies that aimed to refine concepts of film spectatorship and challenge assumptions about the passivity of the female audience. Her work on the reception of films and on the experience of cinema has also been important for revitalizing theories on fandom (cf. Kuhn, 1999d on “enduring fandom”), and she has played a key role in promoting the use of oral history and ethnographic methodologies within the field. In the 1990s, Kuhn started exploring issues of cinemagoing, cinema culture, and cultural memory. Her encounter with memory studies went further than the realm of films and cinema, however, allowing alternative histories or marginal accounts to be reconstructed or recovered. The following interview underlines the importance of Kuhn’s prominent work on photography and memory (e.g. Kuhn, 1995/2002; Kuhn and McAllister, 2006), not least in terms of how that work is directly engaged in self-reflexivity and methodological self-criticism (e.g. Kuhn, 2007). Kuhn’s engagement with photography and memory remains important as well for refining the conceptual apparatus of, and for understanding the interrelationship between, visual culture and memory. From this perspective, Kuhn’s attempt to unravel cinema memory as a subtype of cultural memory (2004) can be read as a bid to create and refine a vocabulary that enables us to talk more clearly and evocatively about people’s experience of c­ inema. The new cinema history vocabulary now includes key concepts and typologies that were launched and developed by Kuhn: “cinema memory,” “memory text,” and “memory work” (2002, 2010a); “remembered images/scenes,” “situated memories,” and “memories of cinemagoing” (2011); and “place-memory,” “memory maps,” and “topographical remembering” (2002, 2004, 2013). During the i­nterview, both interviewee and interviewer were somewhat preoccupied with their collaboration on a thematic issue of the journal Memory Studies, about to go to press at the time, devoted to recent developments in international research on the history of cinemagoing. The interview and the special issue both make clear that much work still needs to be done, with the study of cinemagoing and memory facing new opportunities and challenges, as memory studies offers “a refreshing take on both the history of cinema cultures and on the nature of cultural memory more generally” (Kuhn, ­Biltereyst, and Meers, 2017: 12). Daniel Biltereyst (hereafter DB):  You were trained as a sociologist, later turning

to film studies, a field that is traditionally linked to the humanities. How do you look back at it? Annette Kuhn (hereafter AK):  Yes, I did a bachelor’s and a master’s degree in sociological studies at the University of Sheffield. It was a department that was very much in the tradition of the kind of sociology that emerged from the London School of Economics, led by R.M. Titmuss, a pioneering figure in establishing the discipline in Britain after the Second World War. It favoured a social demography, social policy and social structures approach to sociology. Very English. Part of that was a quite rigorous training in empirical research methods, which, I think, is what stayed with me. So that was my sociological background, and I found that I was drawing on that increasingly in the work on cinema memory, in planning research and so on. It was while I was still an undergraduate at Sheffield that I started moving towards film studies. This was at a time when the Film Society movement was at its height, and a generation of young adults from backgrounds that wouldn’t previously have experienced higher education was going up to university. This made possible a movement of cinephilia among young people who were both highly educated and also interested in popular culture. Sheffield had several film societies, and I joined one in the university and a couple in town. There was 29

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a kind of informal extracurricular “film appreciation” course at the university as well. We would turn up for screenings and talks, and saw all the standard art films of the day. Eventually after graduating I enrolled on an extramural Film Studies Certificate course at what was then Sheffield School of Art and Design and is now part of Sheffield Hallam University. So that’s what got me interested in cinema. Then I moved to London and taught sociology at Goldsmiths College for a while, and in my spare time studied for a Postgraduate Diploma in Film Studies at the Polytechnic of Central London (PCL, now the University of Westminster). After completing the Diploma, I was offered a job teaching on that course. That’s how I got into film studies. DB:  … and into feminist theories. AK:  Yes, but I should say that – going back a little bit – the first job I had right after graduating was in the Sociology Department in Sheffield where I did my degree. I was offered a post as a research assistant on a huge programme called the National Survey of 1960 Graduates. This was a cohort study, kind of Big Data for those days, and a really hard-nosed training in social sciences. But in terms of moving into film studies, I got involved with Screen in 1976, when I joined the editorial board. By that time I had published a short piece in the journal about feminism and film theory (Kuhn, 1975). It was a review article inspired by Claire Johnston’s edited collection on Dorothy Arzner (1975), and the then Screen editor, Ben Brewster, must have thought I would be useful on the editorial board. And so I joined Screen and that sort of became a passport: I mean, I was just a kid really. It was probably on the back of this that in 1979 I was offered a job at the University of Iowa, replacing Dudley Andrew while he was on sabbatical. And so I went there for a semester, and then stayed in the US for another year, standing in for David Bordwell at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. The thing about being in the States, certainly in those days, was that there was this attitude – maybe this is a feature of the American Dream – that if you wanted to do something, you could just go ahead and do it. So while I was over there I decided that really somebody needed to sort out all this stuff on feminism and cinema. I’d done some other publications previously, but I just came back to the UK and got a contract from Routledge and Kegan Paul to write Women’s Pictures: Feminism and Cinema (Kuhn, 1982).4 So that was a big landmark; but as I said, I had already been publishing in Screen and teaching film studies by this time. I had taught a seminar on psychoanalytic film theory in Madison, among other things. DB:  You worked on film censorship as well. AK:  Yes, that came afterwards. There were no jobs – or hardly any – in academia in film studies in Britain at that time, so when I got back from the States I went back to my part-time teaching at the PCL, having also decided that I wanted to do some serious archive-based film-historical research. So I signed up for a PhD on the history of film censorship in Britain, and that’s how that came about. I did that in the mid-1980s; at that point there weren’t many PhDs in film studies. So that was how the book Cinema, Censorship and Sexuality (Kuhn, 1988) came about. It was based on my doctoral thesis, which took a Foucauldian approach to historiography: I argued that in the early years film censorship was productive in the sense that it was actively involved in creating a public sphere of cinema, in creating cinema as an institution and object of regulation. It was the late 1980s by this time, and in the interim I had still been freelancing, working in publishing as well as teaching part-time. I decided it was time to stop living on the edge and get a proper job, and successfully applied for a lectureship in film and television studies at the University of Glasgow. Some years later I took up a post at Lancaster University before moving to Queen Mary. 30

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Auto-ethnography, memory, and photography DB:  At that time there were these new film history approaches, and there were shifts in

terms of going from spectatorship to research on “real” audiences, with influences from cultural studies. AK:  Yes, by the early 1990s there was a big influence on film studies from cultural studies. I must mention that whilst I was doing the censorship research, the game-changing Allen and Gomery book, Film History (1985), came out, and I like to think that the film censorship research was perhaps a small part of this paradigm shift in film historiography. At the same time there were developments in feminist film studies, including debates around film spectatorship and the female spectator, that had been set in train by Laura Mulvey’s seminal article in Screen (1975). These had departed from Mulvey’s premises into what was, in my view, a misguided debate about spectatorship and audiences that conflated the “spectator-in-the-text” of psychoanalytic film theory, with its emphasis on looking, with the social audience of actual people who went to the cinema. But the basic concern was legitimate enough. The kind of question that students would raise, was: Well, what does this say about …? You’re showing us these melodramas from the 1940s in one course and talking about female spectatorship in another course, or even in the same one. How do we know what women actually thought, back then? And I would say: “Well, we don’t know.” It wasn’t just me: there were others – like Jackie Stacey, coming from cultural studies – who decided to find out what women actually thought, by doing some empirical research on the question. For her PhD, and in the investigation that eventually became Star Gazing (1994), Stacey asked some ­searching questions, seeking answers by conducting a questionnaire survey among women who’d gone to the cinema in the 1940s and 1950s. With my sociology hat on I wondered how I’d go about designing this kind of research; and then I thought: “Why only look at women?” DB:  When did you have the first wave of interviews? Was it in the early 1990s? AK:  I think it was later. I had written a chapter for Christine Gledhill and Gillian Swanson’s book Nationalising Feminity (1996) in which I looked at cinema culture and femininity in the 1930s. That’s when I started doing archival research on 1930s cinema culture (Kuhn, 1996). So that was really the beginning of the 1930s project, and it led into applying for a big grant to do what we now know as Cinema Culture in 1930s Britain. I didn’t know what we were going to find, and I don’t think anybody had really embarked on anything of that scale before on this sort of subject. We certainly weren’t prepared for all the stuff about memory that eventually came out, as well as, you know, all the things that seem commonplace now, like the fact that people don’t remember very much – from thirty, forty, however many years back – about individual films and so on. But as we discovered, they do remember who they went to the pictures with and what streets they walked down to get to the cinema. This was all new. But at the same time, actually, I was still working on a feminist-inspired project in what we now call auto-ethnography while teaching an adult education course on autobiography and female identity here in London, attended by a fantastic group of feminist s­tudents. We were looking at a body of what we might call revisionist autobiographical work that was coming out, from the left as well as from feminists, at the time, like Carolyn Steedman’s Landscape for a Good Woman (1986). There was interesting “autobiographical” work going on in feminist art as well with, for instance, Mary Kelly’s Post-Partum ­Doc­ument (1983), a work which has splendidly survived the test of time. That, and particularly Jo Spence’s 31

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work in photography where she did a kind of auto-ethnography using her own pictures, and also her collaborations with Rosy Martin on phototherapy (Martin and Spence, 1987; Spence, 1986), which were, and still are, thought-provoking and inspiring. And so by the time I started the 1930s cinema culture project, I had been working on ­auto-ethnography and on photography and memory for a few years, and putting together the book that eventually became Family Secrets (Kuhn, 1991, 1995/2002), in which I used photos from my own family album, along with other, more public, images as a basis for tracing connections between personal, collective and cultural forms of memory. DB:  How would you describe your interest in photography compared to cinema (Kuhn, 1995/2002, 2007; Kuhn and McAllister, 2006) and the value of photography in terms of this memory work? AK:  I think it’s more personal, and activism is probably too strong a word for it, but in that period I was doing workshops on photography and memory, and people would turn up with their own pictures to work on. These were really interesting and productive. I’ve run them with all sorts of people and it was always fascinating and often quite moving. DB:  Could you elaborate on this? AK:  Well, I would run workshops with colleagues, for instance. Though actually, academics are the worst people to do this with, because they intellectualize the whole time! But I’d run them with students and with feminists from the town when I was at Lancaster. One of the most fascinating workshops I did was at a British Council conference. It involved British Council people from all over the world, including even Israel and Palestine. ­Everyone brought their pictures along, and the process was just so revealing, and moving. People said afterwards: “We knew about each other, we’d mostly met each other before, but just in a morning we learned and understood so much about each other that we could never have done otherwise.” DB:  Then what happened? AK:  Everyone brought a photo along: it would be a personal picture. And they would present it to everybody and say a little bit about it. Then they’d workshop with somebody else, with some questions to look at along the lines described in Family Secrets (Kuhn, 2002: 8), and at the end we’d share all that. The thing about having a photograph to prompt yourself and then sharing with somebody else is that, you know, it gives you a distance, really. At the same time, it’s your own past, so you have permission to talk about it. I stopped doing it when digital photography took off in a big way; though I’m very interested in following recent work on digital photography and memory like that by Emily Keightley and Michael Pickering (2014).

Memory, film, and cinema history DB:  Let’s talk about memory and cinema audiences. There has been a proliferation of

­memory-inspired audience research in film and cinema studies. How do you look at that? AK:  It’s great that people are doing it, and that researchers are getting a decent amount of

money for their projects. So it’s good to see substantial work being done on historical cinema audiences. But the memory-work aspect of it is often a fairly small element. I might not be totally up to date with everything that’s being done in the field, but I do think there’s very productive potential for more in-depth work at the interface of historical audience studies and memory studies. DB:  Can you explain? Quite a few studies claim that they are doing work inspired by memory studies. 32

Film history, cultural memory, cinema experience AK:  Well, if we look at all the work that’s being done, I’d say that some of it is more

­methodologically sophisticated than others. I do think there’s more work to be done on memory work methodology within historical reception studies, on ethno-history of cinemagoing, and so on. So it’s really where memory studies overlaps with historical reception studies that there’s scope for more to be done. My feeling is that on the cinema side there are probably more humanities scholars than social scientists. I’m interested in the extent to which geographers, say, get involved, because they tend to be more ­methodologically savvy, or at least digital methods savvy, than many humanities scholars. I’ve come across some interesting articles in geography about memory and space, which I think ties in very nicely with photography as well as cinema. I cite some of this work in a paper on cinema experience and the child’s world (Kuhn, 2010b). DB:  What do you mean? In terms of conceptualising, theorising? AK:  Both of those. In an interesting article on memory and methodology in the social ­sciences, Emily Keightley (2010) argues that the field is both its object and its method, and one can certainly make this distinction in memory studies. DB:  She also says that “memory studies is not history,” arguing that it is “a lived process of making sense of time and the experience of it” (Keightley, 2010: 55–56). AK:  Exactly. I do feel it’s incumbent on any field of research to be a bit self-conscious, self-reflexive, about methodology. I would contend that most people within new cinema history aren’t doing memory work or memory studies. But insofar as the experience of cinemagoing is central to new cinema history, memory studies surely offers a way into that. In my opinion, memory studies – or memory work, at least – still belongs to a certain extent to the kind of radical or activist or consciousness-raising imperative that inspired phototherapy and feminist autobiography. I don’t know whether that’s an issue for new cinema history or not. DB:  What are the future directions for memory studies oriented historical work on cinema? AK:  Well, I think more work on developing the methodology, and more comparative work, could be done. What is also interesting of course is that now, in terms of finding living informants, we’ll soon be out of the “going to the pictures” generations. So, in the future researchers will need to develop ways of researching cinema memories that may only partly – if at all – involve, say, the walk to the cinema. It should be interesting to refine research methods accordingly. What I think tends to happen is that when researchers embark on these projects, it’s as if they sometimes feel they have to reinvent the wheel a bit. I think that sharing, using existing data and findings, is a way forward. And then building on that, improving ways of analysing and interpreting data would also be a brilliant way forward. And of course, we’ve now got the technology to enable that, if we want to do it. Perhaps this feels less exciting, less sexy, because researchers like to create their own data. But there is a kind of build-up. I mean, for instance, people are doing this kind of work from different disciplinary perspectives: Melvyn Stokes’ and Matt Jones’s project on 1960s cinemagoing in Britain, for example, is very much within the realm of social history (Stokes and Jones, 2017). They’ve gathered many interviews and questionnaires, and it wasn’t part of their original objective to do any interpretive work. But they have made all their material available, totally freely available, on their university’s website.5 And you know, somebody – or lots of people – could do some really interesting memory work analysis on that material. The original project wasn’t aimed at doing that, but the raw material is out there now. In a different way, there’s the work that Jacqueline Maingard (2017) has done with an archive of life history interview transcripts in Cape Town, where she draws on source material that wasn’t even primarily about 33

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cinemagoing. But she found loads of references to the “bioscope” simply because the interviewees had gone to the cinema such a lot. They recalled details of their everyday lives, and cinema was a big part of that. DB:  You once talked about the project you had on making the interviews you did for the 1930s project open access. AK:  There’s a huge amount of material from that project that’s barely been touched on in An Everyday Magic and the other publications from the project. It would be really nice to just have that material out there so that others can see it, draw on it and even make use of it, perhaps in coordination with other research. You could do a nice comparison, say, with the 1960s material that Melvyn Stokes has made available. It could keep academics in useful employment for decades [laughs]. DB:  How important was cinema? I mean, for instance, if you listen to life interviews, and how often people talk about cinema, it might have been not so important. Looking back, also to your work, aren’t we too cinema-centric? AK:  It wasn’t in our remit to assess the proportion of the overall population who felt that cinema was important to them in the 1930s. It was to document and explore people’s recollections of, as it turned out, their youthful experiences of cinemagoing. So when you’re working qualitatively, you’re not doing a sort of demographics, really. You’re doing something more interpretive, and I would say more illuminating in a deep way, in terms of cultural memory and cultural experience more generally.

Psychoanalysis, transitional space, and the film experience DB:  Another thing I would like you to talk about is the continued interest, as I see it, in

psychoanalysis in your work. AK:  As a voice in the wilderness, yes … Recently in the British Association of Film, Tele-

vision and Screen Studies (BAFTSS) there was a move to create a special interest group on psychoanalysis or psychoanalytic film theory, and it took a little while to gather the minimum fifteen takers [laughs].6 Anyway, when I was teaching film theory I continued to get students reading Christian Metz (1982) because I think he has a lot of important things to say about the way film spectatorship works. Some of my students would get interested in psychoanalysis through that. And they’d go and read Freud, and come back a couple of years later and say: “I found this very hard going at the time, but now I find it really valuable.” I think that psychoanalytic theories about vision did open up quite a lot of questions for film theory, but they stopped being fashionable after a certain point, which I think is regrettable. So, I’ve never really forsworn all of that kind of thing. But I have come back to it from a different angle through the 1930s project, because of the way some of our informants looked back on their relationship to cinema. The way people talked about it just put me in mind of growing out of childhood, of being a young child, of the process of becoming more and more independent: “Oh, you know, there was a cinema on every street corner, I first went when I was four years old, and I’d go there with my older brother.” All of that kind of thing; and it feels as if it was a significant remembered moment in their lives. The way cinema is spoken about in these memories comes across as something that belongs inside their heads, their inner worlds, as much as being part of their “real” world. In the book I used the terms “transitional object” and “everyday magic” without thinking very deeply about their meaning. But later on, I began to think there could be something culturally significant about how

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the 30s generation remembered their childhood cinemagoing as involving their earliest ventures outside home. Finding a home outside the home in the neighbourhood cinema seems to have felt sort of slightly dangerous, and yet safe as well because it was nearby and you were with friends or relatives. And then entering this world that was “other,” and also within your own familiar neighbourhood: there’s something of the psychoanalytic about that. So I explored this idea, and found Object Relations (OR) psychoanalysis helpful in several ways, especially Donald Winnicott’s thoughts about playing and the nature of cultural experience (Winnicott, 1971). For example, there’s a lot in Object Relations about creativity, about both making and experiencing art and culture – not so much in Winnicott but in the writings of other OR practitioners like Winnicott’s friend and colleague Marion Milner, who wrote about how, in engaging with a work of art you can sort of become part of it, at one with it, and that this “aesthetic moment” involves a particular form of consciousness. The work of art is no longer just something that exists outside you; it also enters your inner world, so that “time and space are abolished” (Milner, 1993: 27). The aesthetic moment presupposes a particular kind of engagement that is not, or not just, about looking but is a whole mental-bodily process. I found this an interesting way to think about cinema, and about engagement with film, the cinematic experience. You can’t really talk about “spectatorship” here because it’s too narrow a term. So there was that – the aesthetic moment/cultural experience issue – and on the other side there was the finding that going to the pictures was remembered by the 1930s cinemagoers as very important in terms of their childhoods and growing up. It was about trying out something new, entering into new spaces and having new experiences – but safely, in what Winnicott called a “holding environment.” I do feel that OR psychoanalysis offers exciting ways of thinking about and understanding cultural experience more generally. So, that’s really what I’ve been interested in, and so far I seem to be virtually the only person who is [laughs]. It feels like a bit of a lonely furrow (Kuhn, 2013). DB:  In one of your articles (Kuhn, 2007) on more methodological thoughts and reflections on photography, you refer to Carlo Ginzburg (1993) and microhistory. It’s about the subjective experience of the world. You’ve been doing single case studies, which is completely different from the Big Data discourse. How does it relate? AK:  Oh, that’s interesting. I mean, this is my methodology, it’s what I did in my PhD, which is the case history method, really. Yes, that’s why I love Ginzburg, it’s inductive. It’s starting small. It goes with grounded theory, something I used to think about a lot when I worked as a sociologist. You’ve got something in the world that’s there, that everybody can observe and try to understand, and then you work on this and you make your generalizations from these, you know, particular examples. So yes, it’s the very opposite of Big Data, I suppose. Another great thing is that anybody can do it. That was the beauty of the photography and memory workshops. Everybody’s got a photograph. There are a few simple methodological steps you can take, and you can follow them on your own if you want to. So it’s very democratic in that sense. It can be worked by and for anybody: you don’t have to be an academic and you don’t even need any special skills. But it can be methodologically rigorous at the same time. That’s what I like about it, and that to me is an essential aspect of memory work. It does go together with the “idiographic,” which I suppose is another word that can be used for this kind of inductive, case history, type of approach.

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Annette Kuhn

Film text, early memories, and home DB:  There’s a whole discussion going on about the importance of the film or the film as a

text. Your research and much of the cinemagoing work indicates that people talk about their cinema experience, but they tend not to remember the films. AK:  Well, it’s all about memory, isn’t it? You know, I mean when we interviewed people in the 1990s, and they’re talking about their lives sixty years ago, I would say it’s not really surprising that they don’t remember individual films very much, unless they’re real cinephiles, as a few of them were. Some informants did have favorite films, but of course for that generation a film might have been watched once or twice when it first came out and then it would be decades before they might get a chance to see it again, when films started being shown on television and then became available on video. I would say that’s possibly a generational difference and things might be very different if, in thirty years’ time, say, we were to interview people who are watching films now, because they will have been able to see them again and again in the intervening years. So I think that’s a finding, not a problem. There do seem to be a few people who retain quite strong memories of films (Kuhn, 2011), and specifically of scenes and images in films. I think this ties in with some of the research on memory that we cite towards the end of our article on memories of cinemagoing and film experience (Kuhn, Biltereyst, and Meers, 2017). These are all very early memories, memories of going to the cinema for the first time, of being frightened, say, and having a vivid visual or audial memory of what you were frightened by. It’s a particular type of memory. So I think new cinema history doth protest too much perhaps about the film not being i­mportant; because of course it is important, depending on which way you’re looking at it. In An Everyday Magic I did try to bring together film analysis and memory work in a chapter on the 1936 Astaire-Rogers musical Top Hat (Kuhn, 2002: 168–194), which was particularly fondly and frequently remembered. Some of our informants were just fantastic: they were talking about sixty years ago and could recollect, even in a way relive, the feeling of how the scenes in the film were shot and edited. One man from Bury, near Manchester, said something like: “One minute they’re in a little cafe, and then the next they’re in this huge space that’s half as big as Bury.” He’s talking about a particular kind of cinematic transition, and I just think that’s such a wonderfully acute observation. People’s way of talking about their cinema memories, especially if they have a ­particular kind of imagination, can be very filmic, actually. In the “What to do with cinema ­memory” article (Kuhn, 2011), I cite Victor Burgin’s book The Remembered Film (2004), and of course Burgin’s someone for whom the visual has been the whole of his life, and the way he talks about his own memory of a particular film has that kind of vivid, ­imagistic inner-world quality as well. DB:  Maybe a last question, on shifts in your work and on consistency and personal engagement. You’ve done quite different things, in methodological terms, and in terms of working on films, on filmic and cinematic experiences, on photography, and so on. But on the other hand, there is a consistency with issues of memory, experience, the concept of home. AK:  Well, it all comes together in my mind. Perhaps you’re referring to the way crazy people think that everything is linked [laughs]. But I suppose the concept of memory is what’s increasingly linking all the work. The idea of home relates across several levels, too. There’s the work by the visual anthropologist Richard Chalfen (1987), who has done

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Film history, cultural memory, cinema experience

a lot of research on family photography, home movies and home videos, and on how people produce and use their own “home mode imagery,” as he calls it. I think this is a really evocative term. This – home – is a key issue when we talk about family photography and personal photographs. And that, I suppose, relates to the idea of home as somewhere you start out from, that you separate yourself from, but that lives on, happily or unhappily, in your psyche. This informs a lot of memory discourse, certainly around photography, and around films and cinemagoing and so on. What is interesting to me is that I think the basic patterns and relations and engagements probably continue to be there, even though the media, and the ways in which we use them, are changing.

Notes 1 Published in the USA as Annette Kuhn (2002) Dreaming of Fred and Ginger: Cinema and Cultural Memory. New York, NY: New York University Press. 2 Cinema Culture in 1930s Britain, Economic and Social Research Council project R000 23 5385. 3 From 1976 to 1985, Kuhn was a member of Screen’s Editorial Board, and a co-editor of the journal from 1989 to 2014. 4 Second edition published in 1994 by Verso (London, New York). 5 See www.ucl.ac.uk/library/digital-collections/collections/cinema [Accessed 20 November 2018]. 6 See http://baftss.org/special-interest-groups/psychoanalysis-film/ [Accessed 20 November 2018].

References Allen, R.C. and Gomery, D. (1985) Film History: Theory and Practice. Boston, MA: McGraw-Hill. Burgin, V. (2004) The Remembered Film. London: Reaktion Books. Chalfen, R. (1987) Snapshot Versions of Life. Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green State University Popular Press. Gledhill, C. and Swanson, G. (eds.) (1996) Nationalising Femininity. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Ginzburg, C. (1993) “Microhistory: Two or Three Things I Know About It.” Critical Inquiry 20(4): 10–35. Johnston, C. (ed.) (1975) The Work of Dorothy Arzner: Towards a Feminist Cinema. London: British Film Institute. Keightley, E. (2010) “Remembering Research: Memory and Methodology in the Social Sciences.” International Journal of Social Research Methodology 13(1): 55–70. Keightley, E. and Pickering, M. (2014) “Technologies of Memory: Practices of Remembering in ­A nalogue and Digital Photography.” New Media and Society 16(4): 576–593. Kelly, M. (1983) Post-Partum Document. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Kuhn, A. (1975) “Women’s Cinema and Feminist Film Criticism.” Screen 16(3): 107–112. Kuhn, A. (1982) Women’s Pictures: Feminism and Cinema. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Kuhn, A. (1988) Cinema, Censorship and Sexuality, 1909 to 1925. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Kuhn, A. (ed.) (1990) Alien Zone: Cultural Theory and Contemporary Science Fiction Cinema. London: Verso. Kuhn, A. (1991) “Remembrance.” In J. Spence and P. Holland (eds.) Family Snaps: The Meanings of Domestic Photography. London: Virago Press (pp. 17–25). Kuhn, A. (1995/2002) Family Secrets: Acts of Memory and Imagination. London: Verso. Kuhn, A. (1996) “Cinema Culture and Femininity in the 1930s.” In C. Gledhill and G. Swanson (eds.) Nationalising Femininity. Manchester: Manchester University Press (pp. 177–189). Kuhn, A. (1999a) “Memories of Cinemagoing in the 1930s.” Journal of Popular British Cinema 2: 100–120. Kuhn, A. (1999b) “Cinema-Going in Britain in the 1930s: Report of a Questionnaire Survey.” Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television 19(4): 531–543. Kuhn, A. (ed.) (1999c) Alien Zone II: The Spaces of Science Fiction Cinema. London: Verso.

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Annette Kuhn Kuhn, A. (1999d) “‘That Day Did Last Me All My Life’: Cinema Memory and Enduring Fandom.” In M. Stokes and R. Maltby (eds.) Identifying Hollywood’s Audiences: Cultural Identity and the Movies. London: British Film Institute (pp. 135–146). Kuhn, A. (2002) An Everyday Magic: Cinema and Cultural Memory. London: I.B. Tauris. Kuhn, A. (2004) “Heterotopia, Heterochronia: Place and Time in Cinema Memory.” Screen 45(2): 106–114. Kuhn, A. (2007) “Photography and Cultural Memory: A Methodological Exploration.” Visual Studies 22(3): 283–292. Kuhn, A. (2010a) “Memory Texts and Memory Work: Performances of Memory in and with Visual Media.” Memory Studies 3(3): 298–313. Kuhn, A. (2010b) “Cinematic Experience, Film Space, and the Child’s World.” Canadian Journal of Film Studies 19(2): 82–98. Kuhn, A. (2011) “What to Do with Cinema Memory?” In R. Maltby, D. Biltereyst, and Ph. Meers (eds.) Explorations in New Cinema History: Approaches and Case Studies. Malden, MA: Wiley-­ Blackwell (pp. 85–97). Kuhn, A. (ed.) (2013) Little Madnesses: Winnicott, Transitional Phenomena and Cultural Experience. ­L ondon: I.B. Tauris. Kuhn, A., Biltereyst, D., and Meers, Ph. (2017) “Memories of Cinemagoing and Film Experience: An Introduction.” Memory Studies 10(1): 3–16. Kuhn, A. and McAllister, K. (eds.) (2006) Locating Memory: Photographic Acts. Oxford: Berghahn Books. Kuhn, A. and Radstone, S. (eds.) (1990) The Women’s Companion to International Film. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Kuhn, A. and Wolpe, A. (eds.) (1978) Feminism and Materialism: Women and Modes of Production. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Maingard, J. (2017) “Cinemagoing in District Six, Cape Town, 1920s to 1960s: History, Politics, Memory.” Memory Studies 10(1): 17–34. Martin, R. and Spence, J. (1987) Double Exposure: The Minefield of Memory. London: Photographers Gallery. Metz, C. (1982) The Imaginary Signifier: Psychoanalysis and Cinema. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Milner, M. (1993) “The Role of Illusion in Symbol Formation.” In P.L. Rudnytsky (ed.) Transitional Objects and Potential Spaces: Literary Uses of D.W. Winnicott. New York, NY: Columbia University Press (pp. 13–39). Mulvey, L. (1975) “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” Screen 16(3): 6–18. Spence, J. (1986) Putting Myself in the Picture: A Political, Personal and Photographic Autobiography. London: Camden Press. Stacey, J. (1994) Star Gazing: Hollywood Cinema and Female Spectatorship in 1940s and 1950s Britain. London: Routledge. Steedman, C. (1986) Landscape for a Good Woman: A Story of Two Lives. London: Virago Press. Stokes, M. and Jones, M. (2017) “Windows on the World: Memories of European Cinemas in 1960s Britain.” Memory Studies 10(1): 78–90. Winnicott, D.W. (1971) Playing and Reality. London: Tavistock.

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3 How I became a new cinema historian Melvyn Stokes

In 1995–1996, I taught for the first time an MA course in film history. It was called ­Hollywood and the history of American popular film. The first-term theme was “American history and Hollywood film”; the second-term theme was “Hollywood genres.” The course was built around the screening and discussion of relevant film texts. But every week I also included reading for an additional topic. All this may seem of picayune interest, of no significance to others than myself and – maybe – the fifteen students who took the course. But new courses at my institution, University College London (UCL), have to be vetted for their academic and intellectual content. I thought this process might be easier if I included some theory – and spectatorship theory seemed just the thing, the hottest topic at the time in film studies. So, I included lots of spectatorship theory in the first few weeks of the course. We began with Christian Metz’s ideas on semiotics, Louis Althusser’s on ideological state ­apparatuses, the application of Jacques Lacan’s ideas on psychoanalysis of film ­spectatorship, and Laura Mulvey’s pioneering work on the theoretical female spectator. At this point, an American MA student asked an interesting question: “Why are we looking at so much t­ heory? We’re historians.” A good question. Part of the answer is that those who founded the discipline of film studies were very largely not historians. They came from backgrounds in literary studies, philosophy, semiotics, history of art, and communication studies. Their principal focus was on the film as text. By the late 1960s and 1970s, this interest in the filmic text had also spawned growing interest in spectatorship – but the spectators involved were only theoretical ones instead of flesh-and-blood audience members. They had become important initially as a consequence of a broad reappraisal of politics and society in France that accompanied – but was far from being confined to – les événements of May 1968. French writers on film endeavored to demonstrate how the cinematic text (and thus cinema itself as an institution) conditioned or “interpellated” (Althusser, 1971) spectators to acquiesce in and preserve dominant ideological formations (and thus existing social, economic, and political norms). They at first utilized approaches that were grounded in Saussurean semiotics (Metz, 1974) and, later, Lacanian psychoanalysis (Metz, 1982). In the 1970s, as these ideas and approaches gained ground in the rapidly expanding field of field studies, they were accompanied by a growing interest – ­symbolized by the publication of Mulvey’s (1975) article “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” in British film journal Screen – in theoretical female spectatorship. 39

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As film studies practitioners became ever more intense in their pursuit of elusive (and usually passive) theoretical spectators, the most exciting work in history itself – from the Annales school in France through the work of British social and cultural historians such as E.P. Thompson and Raymond Williams to the pioneers of women’s and labor history in the United States – was going in exactly the opposite direction. The main preoccupation of these scholars was with rediscovering and documenting the lives of ordinary men and women and, wherever possible, demonstrating how they actively fought for control over their lives and circumstances. They did their work, in common with more conventional historians, in the empirical fashion that, at least since the work of German historian Leopold von Ranke in the nineteenth century (Boldt, 2015; Iggers and Powell, 1990), has revolved around the examination and analysis of archival materials. This distinguished them sharply both from theorists of film spectatorship (most of who were preoccupied with spectatorship for ­Hollywood films) and the much longer effort – stretching over nearly half a century – to write the history of the American movie industry, since the First World War the economically dominant film industry across much of the world. The first two major “histories” of American film were published by Terry Ramsaye in 1926 and Benjamin Hampton in 1931. Both were produced by men who had worked in the industry; each was from a dramatically different perspective. Ramsaye’s A Million and One Nights reflected his background as an engineer, journalist, and movie editor/producer. Impressionistic and anecdotal, it centered on the film industry’s business and technological giants (particularly Thomas A. Edison) and largely ignored aesthetic, social, and economic issues. Hampton also had a journalistic background, but he had been forced by business pressures to sell his crusading muckraking magazine, Hampton’s, and also proved unsuccessful as a producer in the movie business. His A History of the Movies was primarily a critique of corporatization in Hollywood as a threat to the democratic process. He wrote about films only as commodities and focused on issues such as the defeat of the Edison “Trust” and the emergence of chains of movie theaters. Lewis Jacobs, the author of The Rise of the American Film (1939), the next general history of American movies, was even more politically committed than Hampton: He defended the right of films to address social issues and be made without too much interference. But his attempt to analyze the main elements of the movie industry across the stages of its growth was often little more than a description of the films he deemed “significant.” Two other surveys of the history of American film were published in the 1950s: Arthur Knight’s The Liveliest Art (1957) and Richard Griffith and Arthur Mayer’s The Movies (1957). Neither was a scholarly work: Mayer (1953) was a former theater manager and studio publicist who had authored an entertaining if unreliable memoir of life inside the movie industry of the 1930s and 1940s. It was not until the 1960s that the first significant film histories by academics began to appear: Albert R. Fulton’s Motion Pictures: The Development of an Art (1960) and Kenneth Macgowan’s Behind the Screen (1965). In 1971, professor of English Gerald Mast published the first of a new generation of general histories, A Short History of the Movies (1971). Yet in common with its predecessors and immediate successors, this depended heavily on anecdotal evidence, and its account of movie history focused principally on the activity of a succession of “great” men. I spent most of the summer of 1974 researching the lives of American reformers before the First World War at the Wisconsin State Historical Society Archives in Madison. There I was introduced to a Professor of Communications, Tino Balio, who was just about to leave for a semester’s sabbatical in London. Balio told me he had been working in the archives of the United Artists studio and was going to carry on looking at United Artists files in ­L ondon. To my shame, looking back, I had no idea how novel what he was doing was. 40

How I became a new cinema historian

Didn’t all historians look at archives? But before the 1970s, almost no one in film studies seemed aware that there were archival materials available for the study of film. This made the publication of Balio’s (1976) history of the United Artists studio a groundbreaking event: It abandoned the “great men” approach to the history of the movies by analyzing United Artists as an economic institution, and it was grounded in thorough research in the studio archives. In the decade leading up to the start of my MA course on film history, film scholars began increasingly to use archival research to shed light on the diverse contexts that influenced the making and form of film texts. In 1988, for example, Thomas Schatz (1988) discussed the effect of the different studios’ house style on the movies they produced in The Genius of the System. In 1991, Lea Jacobs analyzed Production Code files to demonstrate that the narrative content of films was often greatly influenced by H ­ ollywood’s system of self-regulation. Looking at “fallen women” films of the 1930s and early 1940s, she argued that much of what was shown in them was the product of a process of constant negotiation ( Jacobs, 1991). There were other books and articles over this period – works I was myself reading or becoming aware of. But my initial interest was in how American history had been represented and interpreted in Hollywood films and I taught an undergraduate one-term course on this from 1989. And it was through teaching American history, as well as my growing interest in film and its uses, that I found myself setting off on a new path that would engage me for much of the next decade. Since 1930 UCL has had a tradition of lectures in American history endowed by the Commonwealth Fund. Once a series of lectures by a distinguished US historian, this had been changed in the mid-1960s into a single lecture followed by a day’s colloquium discussing the lecture. This formula, in turn, was looking somewhat tired by the beginning of the 1990s. I pushed for a new style of larger conference with keynote speakers and paper submissions. By 1996, I had organized several of these, including events exploring race and class in the ­A merican South since 1890 (1992), the “market revolution” in nineteenth-century America (1994) and the US and the European Alliance (1996). Co-edited books based on these conferences had either been published or were in preparation. I thought it was finally about time to have a conference in 1998 on what was increasingly my new specialty of film. The subject of this conference emerged as a result of two influences. The first was my growing interest in the making and reception of D.W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation (1915) – an interest that would eventually lead to a 2007 book on the subject. Back in the mid-1990s, however, through following The Birth of a Nation trail, I discovered Janet Staiger’s (1992a) fine essay on the critical debates surrounding the film in the decades after its first release. This, in turn, led to Staiger’s (1992b) broader ideas on the historical reception of movies. The second influence arose from a frank recognition on my part that, as a ­johnny-­come-fairly-lately to film history, it would be sensible to seek a partner for such a conference. I knew of Richard Maltby from various British Association of American Studies conferences I had attended in the past. So, I was very pleased to see that he was giving a seminar paper in London’s Institute of Historical Research while I was mulling over the idea of a film history conference. For Richard, all unsuspecting, it was an opportunity to discuss I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang (Warner Bros., 1932). For me, it was a kind of audition. At the end of the paper, I asked a question. I don’t remember what it was, though I do remember wondering if it might be too elementary. Richard treated it with a seriousness it perhaps didn’t deserve, and I was impressed. A few days later, I rang him up at Sheffield Hallam University, and we talked about possible topics for a film history conference. It was during this discussion that Richard observed that “not much has been done on audiences.” 41

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In the end, the call for papers we issued covered both movie reception and movie audiences. Staiger agreed to give a keynote on reception and Robert C. Allen (1979), who had published a pioneering article on nickelodeon audiences in Manhattan, on audiences. Expecting a small-scale conference, we were overwhelmed by the response to the call. E ­ ventually, over 160 people registered and more than fifty gave papers. We divided all the papers into four streams for programming purposes. Once we’d done this, I sent off a list of the papers we’d categorized in this way to a number of mostly British publishers. Routledge, with Rebecca Barden then as commissioning editor for film, was interested, and we talked about the possibility of one large book bringing together the best of the conference papers. Other publishers turned down the idea flat: Andrew Lockett, for example, then commissioning editor for film and media at Oxford University Press (OUP), wrote to me a courteous note that OUP didn’t usually publish conference volumes of this kind. Academics are just as used as actors to rejection, so I thought little more of this. Then, a few weeks later, I got a telephone message in my mailbox to “please call Andrew Lockett at the BFI” and a number to ring. I did and Andrew, who had just become head of educational publishing at the British Film Institute, invited me to come to see him at Stephen Street in London. We sat in his fairly small office for a while making small talk and discussing the forthcoming conference. Then, he produced the list of papers divided into streams I had sent, hunched over it and said quietly, “I don’t think this is one book [long pause]. I think it’s four books.” For the first (and possibly last) time in my life, I left a meeting knowing what it must feel like to win the lottery. By the time the conference was over and we were working on the BFI volumes, R ­ ichard had moved to Flinders University in Australia. We fell into a pattern of hemispherical collaboration by email that would last nearly five years. At our most efficient, I would edit a piece received perhaps from somewhere in the United States, send it off at the end of the European day (I was and still am an EU “Remainer”) to Richard, who would open it on an Adelaide morning, edit it more, and often send it back to the author that same day. In this fashion, we produced the first two volumes of our BFI series on audiences in 1999, another in 2001, and the final one in 2004 (Stokes and Maltby, 1999a; Stokes and Maltby, 1999b; Stokes and Maltby, 2001; Maltby and Stokes, 2004). In 2003, I organized a second “audiences” conference at UCL on “Hollywood and Everyday Life.” Again, it was a collaboration with Richard with, this time, considerable input from Allen. It also resulted in a book, published at ­R ichard’s suggestion by Exeter University Press (Maltby, Stokes, and Allen, 2007). Once the 2003 conference was over, apart from these publications plans, I moved on to working on other things, including a book on the making and reception of D.W. Griffith’s appalling racist epic The Birth of a Nation (1915). I looked benignly on efforts to keep the spirit of ‘98 and ‘03 alive through a symposium in Virginia chaired by Arthur Knight in 2004 and a conference in Ghent organized by Daniel Biltereyst and Philippe Meers in 2007. But I did not participate in them (apart from a flying visit at the start of the Ghent conference to launch the Going to the Movies book) or in the new HoMER (History of Moviegoing, Exhibition, and Reception) organization founded in 2004. Those involved were fine scholars who were actually researching in-depth local exhibition and audiences. I didn’t think I would ever do anything of this kind myself. But then, in 2008, I was invited by the alumni office at UCL to give a lecture on films of the 1960s to a meeting of alumni who had graduated in that decade. At the end of the talk, nearly a third of the audience impressed me by gathering around the podium to talk about their experiences of cinemagoing in London in the 1960s. It occurred to me afterward that it might be a good idea to collect memories of this kind, not just from graduates but also from the wider population and not simply from London but also from the United Kingdom as a whole. 42

How I became a new cinema historian

In academic life, there is often a long gap between having an idea and attempting to put it into execution. It was not until 2011 and 2012 that I finally put together an application to the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) in Britain for a three-year research project to be called Cultural Memory and British Cinema-going of the 1960s. Between 1 January 2013 and 31 December 2015, with the participation of three brilliant successive research associates, Matthew Jones, Emma Pett, and Patrick Glen, we collected over 900 completed questionnaires on people’s memories of cinemagoing and did over 70 interviews. In the last four months of the project, Patrick Glen and Matt Mahon, Digital Curation Manager in UCL Library, worked together to turn the project records into a digital collection. In late 2016, thinking that the results of the earlier project – and the existence of our new c­ ollection – might perhaps be publicized more widely, I successfully applied to the AHRC for a further year’s funding (1 May 2017 to 30 April 2018) for impact and engagement, having as its centerpiece forty-four events of different kinds across the United Kingdom designed to bring our findings to a broader audience.1 During the years in which I was working on these two projects, HoMER was taking off as an organization. Collaborating in some years with the European Network for Cinema and Media Studies (NECS), an association of film scholars and archivists, it organized a series of workshops with growing numbers of panels and speakers. I saw the first of these, in Prague in June 2013, advertised as a sequel to the Ghent conference of 2007. Since it included participants working on oral and written memories of cinemagoing, I asked Matthew Jones, then researcher on the Cultural Memory and British Cinema-going project, to attend and talk about the work we were doing. Matt came back full of enthusiasm for the scholars HoMER had attracted and the research they were engaged upon – in many respects analogous to our own. The following year, I attended the HoMER workshop at the NECS conference in Milan, where Meers was kind enough at the opening meeting to greet me as one of the founders of the study of audiences and exhibition. I also went to the conference organized by HoMER in association with the AHRC Early Cinema in Scotland project in Glasgow in June 2015 and the HoMER workshop at NECS in Potsdam in June 2016. In the very first of the British Film Institute series Richard and I edited, it was noted in the introduction that The history of the audience remains the most elusive aspect of cinema history, since audiences form only the most temporary of communities, and leave few traces of their presence. But the historical significance of film (as of most of popular culture) is to be found more in its reception than its production – in the meanings, often not clearly articulated, that audiences read into it and the uses to which they put it. (Stokes and Maltby, 1999b: 9) The audiences for American movies that our contributors dealt with in this first volume were all themselves American. In the second volume, a number of scholars began to explore the reactions of foreign audiences to American films: Annette Kuhn (1999), for example, used material from her extensive survey of British cinemagoing of the 1930s to write about a small group of British women from Lancashire who – by regularly watching video cassettes of the musicals of Nelson Eddy and Jeanette MacDonald – remained fans of the stars and their films sixty years later. In the final volume of the series, contributors looked exclusively at foreign audiences – in Australia, Belgium, Central Africa, France, India, Japan, Turkey, and the United Kingdom – for American films, analyzing how these local audiences had understood and sometimes reimagined such movies from the perspective of their own cultural identities 43

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(Maltby and Stokes, 2004). In the book we edited with Allen in 2007, most of the chapters dealt with American audiences and exhibition, though the final part of the book included a number of studies of how foreign audiences exhibited and received American productions (Maltby, Stokes, and Allen, 2007). By 2011, when Maltby, Biltereyst, and Meers (2011) edited a volume titled Explorations in New Cinema History arising out of the Ghent conference in 2007, it was clear that audience studies of cinema were changing. While American audiences and reception remained an object of study, there was a movement away from the focus on the screening of what could be termed “Hollywood” products toward alternative film exhibition practices. Whether in or outside the United States, there has been a growing concentration on the local and the specific, as opposed to the national (or international) and the general. Much of the work of new cinema historians has been on “microhistory” – detailed studies of local patterns of distribution, exhibition, and cinemagoing that map them into analyzable datasets using techniques such as “spatial analysis and geovisualisation” (Maltby, 2011: 9). Yet new cinema history has also endeavored to bring together both quantitative history and qualitative history, including ethnographic techniques and oral history as well as more traditional archival work in newspapers, the cinema “trade” press, and the records of those engaged in the businesses of distributing and exhibiting movies. Its aim is an ambitious one: to create a social and cultural history of cinemagoing that has broad appeal across a range of disciplines. By its very nature indeed, as Maltby points out in an introduction that is simultaneously an intellectual tour de force and a manifesto, new cinema history is “inherently interdisciplinary” (2011: 34). In less than twenty years, I have gone from being a historian of the ideas of pre-First World War American reformers to directing two research projects on 1960s British cinemagoing. Without my growing interest in movie exhibition, audiences, and reception, this would never have happened. So, I am happy to define myself today as both a supporter and practitioner of what is now the new cinema history.

Note 1 See https://www.ucl.ac.uk/library/digital-collections/collections/cinema.

References Allen, R. C. (1979) “Motion Picture Exhibition in Manhattan, 1906–1912: Beyond the Nickelodeon.” Cinema Journal 18(2): 2–15. Althusser, L. (1971) “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes towards an Investigation).” In B. Brewster (trans.) Lenin and Philosophy. London: New Left Books (pp. 127–186). Balio, T. (1976) United Artists: The Studio Built by the Stars. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press. Boldt, A. D. (2015) The Life and Work of the German Historian Leopold von Ranke (1795–1886): An Assessment of His Achievements. Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press. Fulton, A. R. (1960) Motion Pictures: The Development of an Art from Silent Films to the Age of Television. Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press. Griffith, R. and Mayer, A. (1957) The Movies: The Sixty-Year Story of the World of Hollywood and Its Effect on America: From Pre-Nickelodeon Days to the Present. New York, NY: Simon and Schuster. Hampton, B. B. (1931) A History of the Movies. New York, NY: Covici-Friede. Iggers, G. and Powell, J. M. (eds.) (1990) Leopold von Ranke and the Shaping of the Historical Discipline. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press. Jacobs, L. (1939) The Rise of the American Film: A Critical History. New York, NY: Harcourt, Brace and Co. Jacobs, L. (1991) The Wages of Sin: Censorship and the Fallen Woman Film, 1928–1942. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press.

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How I became a new cinema historian Knight, A. (1957) The Liveliest Art: A Panoramic History of the Movies. New York, NY: Macmillan. Kuhn, A. (1999) “‘That Day Did Last Me All My Life’: Cinema Memory and Enduring Fandom.” In M. Stokes and R. Maltby (eds.) Identifying Hollywood’s Audiences: Audiences and Cultural Exchange. London: British Film Institute Publishing (pp. 135–146). Macgowan, K. (1965) Behind the Screen: The History and Techniques of the Motion Picture. New York, NY: Delacorte Press. Maltby, R. (2011) “New Cinema Histories.” In R. Maltby, D. Biltereyst, and Ph. Meers (eds.) Explorations in New Cinema History: Approaches and Case Studies. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell (pp. 3–40). Maltby, R., Biltereyst, D., and Meers, Ph. (eds.) (2011) Explorations in New Cinema History: Approaches and Case Studies. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell. Maltby, R. and Stokes, M. (eds.) (2004) Hollywood Abroad: Audiences and Cultural Exchange. London: BFI Publishing. Maltby, R., Stokes, M., and Allen, R. C. (eds.) (2007) Going to the Movies: Hollywood and the Social Experience of Cinema. Exeter: Exeter University Press. Mast, G. (1971) A Short History of the Movies. New York, NY: Pegasus. Mayer, A. (1953) Merely Colossal: The Story of the Movies from the Chaise Longue to the Long Chase. New York, NY: Simon and Schuster. Metz, C. (1974) Language and Cinema. The Hague: Mouton. Metz, C. (1982) The Imaginary Signifier: Psychoanalysis and the Cinema. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Mulvey, L. (1975) “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” Screen 16(3): 6–18. Ramsaye, T. (1926) A Million and One Nights: A History of the Motion Picture. New York, NY: Simon and Schuster. Schatz, T. (1988) The Genius of the System: Hollywood Filmmaking in the Studio Era. New York, NY: Pantheon. Staiger, J. (1992a) “The Birth of a Nation: Reconsidering Its Reception.” In J. Staiger (ed.) Interpreting Films: Studies in the Historical Reception of American Cinema. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press (pp. 139–153). Staiger, J. (1992b) Interpreting Films: Studies in the Historical Reception of American Cinema. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Stokes, M. and Maltby, R. (eds.) (1999a) American Movie Audiences: From the Turn of the Century to the Early Sound Era. London: British Film Institute Publishing. Stokes, M. and Maltby, R. (eds.) (1999b) Identifying Hollywood’s Audiences: Cultural Identity and the Movies. London: British Film Institute Publishing. ­ udiences. Stokes, M. and Maltby, R. (eds.) (2001) Hollywood Spectatorship: Changing Perceptions of Cinema A London: British Film Institute Publishing.

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4 The subject of history and the clutter of phenomena John Caughie

This chapter is intended as a post hoc reflection on a three-year project on early cinema in Scotland between 1896 and 1927.1 It addresses issues of historiography, of the geography of exhibition, and of film representation in a small nation which does not have a sustainable indigenous production sector. In this sense, it aims to address issues which are familiar to new cinema history. At the same time, it engages with the troubling question of what the history of cinema has to do with the history of film. It is shaped by the initial proposition of the project that the major output would not be a monograph that would synthesize the data to produce a coherent argument, but would instead be a website that in some way reflected the complexity of data: the specificities of localities, contexts, venues, and organization. The attraction of the web, whatever its real practical difficulties, is that it is an open assemblage rather than a closed narrative and that it is dynamic, accessible, and open to comment and amendment. The danger of the web is that data accumulate and argument is lost: too much information and not enough meaning. In a classic and eloquent statement of the art and craft of the historian, Lytton Strachey, in the 1918 Preface to his Eminent Victorians, extols the virtues of ignorance as a simplifying art: “ignorance is the first requisite of the historian – ignorance, which simplifies and clarifies, which selects and omits, with a placid perfection unattainable by the highest art” (2003: 1). He proposes, instead, a subtler strategy for the historian: He will attack his subject in unexpected places; he will fall upon the flank, or the rear; he will shoot a sudden, revealing searchlight into obscure recesses, hitherto undivined. He will row out over that great ocean of material, and lower down into it, here and there, a little bucket, which will bring up to the light of day some characteristic specimen, from those far depths, to be examined with a careful curiosity. (Strachey, 2003: 1) It is a seductive image and is picked up by E.H. Carr in 1961, in his equally classical statement, What is History? (2001). Carr notes Strachey’s “mischievous” recommendation of ignorance and envies the medieval or ancient historian who can be so competent “because they are so ignorant of their subject.” The modern historian, he says,

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enjoys none of the advantages of this built-in ignorance. He must cultivate this ignorance for himself – the more so the nearer he comes to his own times. He has the dual task of discovering the few significant facts and turning them into facts of history, and of discarding the many insignificant facts as unhistorical. (Carr, 2001: 8–9) The art of the historian, then, is a narrative art, built on the confidence of discriminating between historical and unhistorical facts or on knowing which buckets tell the story of the ocean. The difficulty which such classical historiographical positions present is the selectivity of the narrative paradigm, a narrative which explains the past “with a placid perfection” and puts the data into perspective. Cinema history is rich in such narrative paradigms – “the modernity thesis,” “the cinema of attractions,” “the era of transition,” “classical cinema,” and its narrative – and they are indeed valuable framing narratives. Ambitiously, however, new cinema history has set itself the goal of understanding moviegoing and the ways in which the experience of cinema is shaped by exhibition and reception. It is, to a greater or lesser extent, a history of audiences and, therefore, also a history of social subjectivities, and subjectivities are more likely to be caught up in the local, the partial, the imprecise, and the disorderly. Every bucket brings more information, and every fact may be historical. As Robert Allen (2011: 56) says, it is a landscape of “uncertain, untethered pathways and networks.” In Tropics of Discourse in 1978, Hayden White traces the notion of historical discourse back to its Latin roots in discurrere, “running to and fro.” A discourse, he says, moves “to and fro” between received encodations of experience and the clutter of phenomena which refuse incorporation into conventionalized notions of “reality,” “truth” or “possibility.” Discourse, in a word, is quintessentially a mediative enterprise. (White, 1978: 4) For cinema history, the ordered perspectives of the narrative paradigms seem constantly to be threatened or distracted by the clutter of phenomena that refuse incorporation. While, for example, I have always been seduced by the modernity thesis, by the ­confluence of early cinema and urban modernity, I want to hold against it the instance of a ­cinematograph exhibition given in 1898 in Inveraray by the Duchess of Argyle to an audience of around 800, comprising 300 children and her crofting tenants (Oban Times, 15 January 1898), or the report of a school treat with moving pictures given in 1903 by the landed gentry of Lyndale House on Skye to the tenants of the estate, at which the children were urged by the Presbyterian minister, in his vote of thanks, to be grateful for the attention shown to them by their superiors (Oban Times, 19 September 1903). Children, church, and gentry: the cinematograph not as a technology of modernity but as an instrument for ensuring the continuity of the benevolent patronage of feudal landowners and the authority of the ­Presbyterian church. Or what am I to do with Violet Domino, a Scottish woman who is recorded in 1924 and 1925 in Ayr, Glasgow, Edinburgh, Scarborough, and London, on her way to the colonies and foreign parts? Identified in the trade and local press as the “British Mystery Film Girl,” always “hiding her identity” behind a violet mask, a domino, “on the screen and in the ­theatre,” she accompanied the screening of the films she had made in the course of her travels in Western Ireland, the Scottish Highlands, and in the streets of London with commentary and the singing of folk songs in her “fine operatic voice” (The Bioscope, 21 February

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1924 and 11 September 1924). Is she simply, in Carr’s terms, an insignificant, unhistorical fact; an anecdotal figure to brighten up the data; or is she a historical fact, a performer and ­fi lmmaker who points to an empty space between variety, where women performers were ­commonplace, and cinematography, where women filmmakers were not? While there is ample evidence of women taking up roles in the operation of cinemas, from manager to projector operator or cashier, particularly during the First World War, there is very little evidence of women filling the role of filmmaker.2 And if this points to a historic absence around women and filmmaking in early cinema, what is the significance of the mystery of the gothic mask and the pseudonym which still conceals her identity? In pursuing the experience of cinema not just historically but also geographically, not just as an urban experience but also as a rural and small-town experience, any desire for the “received encodations of experience” or for the plenitude of the historical subject is continually and precisely “scotched” by the “clutter of phenomena.” I use the term “scotched” here to signify the mediation of which White speaks, and to retain a trace of the resistance, the refusal of incorporation, between the interpretation and the clutter. One of the determinants of my part of the wider historical project on early cinema in Scotland was a decision to focus, not on the major urban centers like Glasgow, Edinburgh, Dundee, and Aberdeen, but on small towns. I attempted to trace, mainly through local newspapers, the development of early cinema in a sample of small towns located in “remote” areas, in central industrial service areas, or in market towns: Lerwick in Shetland, Oban and Campbeltown in the West Highlands; Bo’ness, a port and mining town on the Forth estuary, thirty miles from Glasgow; and Hawick, a market and textile town in the Borders. In the 1911 census, the population of Lerwick was 4,664; Oban was 5,567; Campbeltown was 7,625; Bo’ness was 10,862; and Hawick was 16,877. The decision to focus on small towns was partly to destabilize histories of cinema that were dependent on the metropolitan experience. My working assumption was that rural and small-town cinemas would share some properties and practices that would differentiate them from metropolitan cinemas. It also reflected the fact that of the total population of Scotland in the 1911 census, 57 percent lived in towns and rural districts of less than 30,000 inhabitants, and that the particular complexion and population density in Scotland might in some way be distinctive: a central industrial belt of high population density and a large, dispersed highland area that had one of the lowest population densities in Europe. At the same time, I was intrigued by Robert Crawford’s claim in a review in the Times Literary Supplement that modernism in Scotland was not associated with urban centers but with remote locations and small towns: If modernism is often associated with urban centres – Paris, London, Dublin, New York  – then Scottish modernism is strikingly eccentric. The Orkney and Shetland ­Islands and small coastal towns like Montrose were more important to its nurturing than Glasgow and Edinburgh. (Crawford, 2009: 7) This eccentricity seemed worth pursuing in identifying the particularity of Scotland’s “modernity.” Informing this was the discussion by the historian, Tom Devine (1999), of a distinctive “parish state”: a social organization in Scotland in which the Presbyterian parish, from the Reformation onwards, had formed a devolved and decentralized social organization responsible not just for discipline but also for welfare, and that this gave a particular significance 48

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to the distinctiveness of place. While I had expected small towns to be different from big towns, I had not expected them to be so different from each other, and the governing concept of the nation, of a distinctively Scottish early cinema, began to break up into localities. The claims of a “national cinema” seem fragile when they are exposed to the particularities of place and the clutter of phenomena. Two points of difference are worth establishing. The first concerns the mix of variety and cinema: the slow and hesitant move away from variety in some small towns, and the apparently relaxed move toward picture-only programs in others. Of the three major venues in Hawick, the Hawick Pavilion, until at least 1928, was advertising itself as a “Picture and Variety Theatre”; The Theatre on Croft Road was interrupting its picture-only programs with visiting theater companies from London; and the King’s on a Saturday night became a Palais de Danse. Even more strikingly, in Bo’ness, thirty miles from Glasgow, one can trace the attempts in the Hippodrome, a purpose-built cinema opening in 1912, and the Picture House (later, the Star Cinema), opening in 1920, to give up variety and to concentrate on picture-only programs, only to relapse into mixed programs. The Picture House opened in January 1920, advertising itself as (and designed for) a picture-only program. It closed for refurbishment, however, in October 1921, and re-opened in December with a newly built stage to accommodate live acts. The pattern is not uncommon. In the postwar period, variety acts were becoming expensive, and many managers sought to be picture houses exclusively. Audiences, however, seemed to drive them back to live acts, much later, and even into the sound period, than metropolitan histories would expect. This persistence of variety is important. Although we write in the knowledge that cinema for much of the early period was a mix of the cinematograph and the concert party, we seem to perpetuate the notion of a cinematic experience and a cinematic subject. The persistence of variety and live acts in many small towns in what we think of as purpose-built cinemas, where Nostromo (Fox, 1926) and Beau Geste (Paramount, 1926) may be interrupted by comedy juggling; where The Iron Horse (Fox, 1924) may be accompanied by Mademoiselle Dalmere’s Table Circus of performing rats, monkeys, and canaries; or where the cinema on Saturday night may become a “palais de danse,” means that we need some theory of a performative rather than simply a cinematic subject, of a participatory and active experience rather than an experience of consumption. At the same time, the persistence of variety is not universal. If we look at Lerwick, or Oban or Campbeltown, we find that the cinema, from its introduction around 1913, is at least advertised as a picture house, even if its programs may at certain points have incorporated live turns. The letter book of Arthur Mann, the manager of the North Star cinema in Lerwick, which survives for a few months in 1915, shows that although they are not advertised in the local press, he is booking variety acts through an agent in Dundee. Already, however, he is complaining about the difficulty of securing the quality of touring acts that he wants: My dear Macnair … Just a word – if you value your reputation as an agent don’t for God’s sake book The Three Nelsons for in sketches or want of real histrionic talent they Are The Limit. I have your wire stating you can’t fix up an artist for next week and am not certain whether or not I will keep them. I really think it would pay me to let them go now – however you did your best. Many thanks for your efforts on my behalf. (Letter from Arthur Mann to A.B. McNair (agent) Dundee, 5 August 1915) 3 49

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It seems probable that touring live acts booked through an agent disappear from the program soon after, to be replaced only occasionally by known local performers: local musicians, local comedy, and local recitations. For the most part, programs seem to have been picture-only after 1918, and by the 1920s, unlike the programs of Bo’ness or Hawick, the program looks much like the program of a cinema in Glasgow or Edinburgh. The problems in Lerwick of geographical access and the unpredictability of North Sea weather made touring variety a particular problem and an expensive risk. If we turn to Oban, however, we find that touring concert parties with their cinematograph exhibitions seem to disappear almost completely from about 1903 and that when the Cinema House opens in 1913, it opens as a picture-only cinema. The disappearance of concert parties, with or without animated pictures, is unusual. Oban had been connected to Glasgow and the south by the West Highland Railway since 1897, and, in that sense, is much more accessible than Lerwick. So, remoteness is not, in itself, the answer. What seems distinctive is that Oban had a rich entertainment program throughout the period, but it was a Gaelic program, with Gaelic singers and Gaelic choirs. In the 1911 census, more than 50 percent of the population habitually spoke Gaelic, and the culture was still closely tied to the Jacobite heritage: the letters columns of the Oban Times are full of debates about the clans and the 1745 Jacobite Rising, and in 1914, just after the outbreak of war, a recruiting sergeant could still make an appeal to “the descendants of the old brave men of the ‘45’” (Oban Times, 19 September 1914). Within that particular culture, Oban is as different from Lerwick or Bo’ness as it is from Glasgow or Edinburgh, and what determines the place and the functioning of cinema and of touring concert parties is not transport links but a distinctive and local cultural history. The second point of emphasis concerns the civic standing of cinema. Using a distinction that has sometimes been made in British television to distinguish between commercial television and public service television, I suggest a distinction in early cinema between a cinema that sought to engage its audience as citizens and a cinema that was content to engage it as consumers. In Bo’ness and Hawick, on the one hand, the new cinema buildings in 1912 and 1913 were opened by the provost of the town with a full civic ceremony that welcomed the potential of the cinema to “educate and elevate the tastes of the people” (Bo’ness Journal, 15 March 1912), and there is frequent comment in the press on developments in the c­ inemas. In Lerwick, on the other hand, the North Star was opened in 1913 by the exhibition ­company’s accountant, and in Oban and Campbeltown, the new buildings opened without ceremony. The distinction is shorthand and a little crude, but it indicates the importance that many cinemas attached to civic recognition. It is certainly the case that throughout Scotland, cinema proprietors were part of a new entrepreneurial class and many of them took on roles in local councils and in a few cases as Members of Parliament. It is also true that in many small towns, the cinema was seen as a civic asset, part of the heraldry of the town’s m ­ odernity, an integral component of the town’s cultural self-perception, a guarantee of being ­“up-to-date.” Even in Shetland, where the local council in Lerwick showed relatively little interest in the North Star Cinema, a retired schoolmaster in Burravoe and a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society could write to the Shetland Times: Sir, The floating of a picture palace company in Lerwick is a significant feature of the progress of that town, and wherever these houses have been established the social status of the people has advanced both in a diminution of drink consumption and in general purity. (Shetland Times, 17 May 1913) 50

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But it is also true that in other small towns – from my sample, Oban – the cinematograph and the cinema seem ancillary: advertised, sometimes only occasionally, dependent instead on handbills, and barely noticed by the local press as civic and cultural amenities. To resist any uniformity, however, or any temptation to attribute this to a West Highland or Island mentality, the Lewis Picture House, opening in strict Presbyterian Stornoway in 1915, was opened with a civic welcome by the Provost – with every confidence “that the house would be so conducted that those who had misgivings about ‘the pictures’ coming to Stornoway would find that their fears were groundless” (The Bioscope, 25 March 1915). The reasons for the differences in the civic status of the cinema in small towns are probably not uniform, but lurking within it, there seems to be evidence of the spectator as a historical social subject with a variable, particular, and locally specific mix of citizen and consumer, located within quite distinct local cultures. Similarly, the difference in the experience of a cinema which is still caught between “theatricality” and “absorption” suggests a subject which is still at play between participation and consumption, a spectator for whom a “good night out” involves active engagement and singing along as well as the thrills of the chase or the pathos of the moment.4 Precisely, the excitement of this period of cinema history is that it has not yet been quite institutionalized or “house-trained.” “The cultural turn,” says Miri Rubin (2002: 80), “asks not only ‘How it really was’ but rather ‘How was it for him, or her, or them?’” And that question, and cinema’s place within it, raises questions not only of cultural history but also of the geography of that history and the distinctiveness of local cultures. While one can trace in the years after the First World War the undertones of globalization and standardization, the study of cinema in small towns and remote locations reminds us how contingent that was, and how much, throughout the period, the experience of cinema was local and the subject of history was not yet quite determined by the metropolitan experience. The problem of how films as representative forms are to be written into new cinema history seems be built into the foundations. On the first page of their introduction to the foundational collection, Going to the Movies: Hollywood and the Social Experience of Cinema, Richard Maltby and Melvyn Stokes say, During the last ten years, researchers have increasingly acknowledged that cinema cannot be comprehensively studied merely by studying films, and that in order adequately to address the social and cultural history of cinema, we must find ways to write the history of its audiences. (Maltby and Stokes, 2007: 1) The status of the “merely” here is elusive. A theoretical wall, or, less grandly, a boundary of comprehension, seems to have erected itself between what is usually thought of as “film studies” and what is now thought of as “new cinema history.” This is not simply a turf war: the issue of how films are to be accommodated within cinema history is not simply one of territorial assertion or redressing past imbalances. There is a real problem about how films are to be read historically, and it is a problem for social history as much as for textual analysis. In his article, “On history and the cinema,” in Screen in 1990, Geoffrey Nowell-Smith ­acknowledges that “A history of reception offers a useful corrective to positionless, ‘objectivizing’ histories” such as those often posed by an obsessive concentration on texts. But, he adds, in order to illuminate the presence of film within culture, reception studies need to be supplemented by theories of fantasy on the one hand and of the relation between images 51

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and their referents on the other. For although culture can indeed be seen in terms of shared knowledges and agreed practices of cognition, it is also determined by more arcane processes in which a central role is played by fantasy and the devious modes of its binding to the real. (Nowell-Smith, 1990: 171) He concedes that the “psychoanalytically informed work of the 70s, with its focus on ‘the subject,’ has proven inflexible and hard to adapt to the task of tracing changing patterns of subjectivity,” but concludes that “it is in the changing patterns of subjectivity, and their complex relationship to other patterns of historical change, that the story of cinema’s effectivity lies” (Nowell-Smith, 1990: 171). What is at stake for both textual analysis and for cinema history is understanding these changing patterns and the determinations which define them. In November 1897, a report on the cinematograph in the Campbeltown Courier which was to be first shown in the Victoria Hall later that week reported that scenes can be seen as well and almost as life-like as if the spectator were looking at the real thing and not at these photos of it. The whole is so wonderful and fascinating that one never tires of looking at it. (Campbeltown Courier, 13 November 1897) The report reproduces the familiar image of the “innocent” spectator who can look at these silent, shaky, black and white images in wonder as if they were looking at the “real thing”: Lumiéres’ spectators cowering under their seats, or Gorki’s “Kingdom of Shadows.” The following week, however, the Campbeltown Courier, reports on the audience, “behaving in a most noisy and unseemly manner” and making comments “couched in the most vulgar language,” because the operator was “second rate”: “His lens was not properly adjusted, while his screen was placed too low, making it impossible for those behind to see” (Campbeltown Courier, 20 November 1897). The innocent spectator turns out to be quite knowing: “The public is an examiner,” says Benjamin in 1936 (1973: 243), “but an absent-minded one.” The problem for the social history of cinema, then, for moviegoing, exhibition, and reception, is how to accommodate, within the “patterns of historical change,” issues of subjectivity which are to some degree determined by “fantasy and the devious modes of its binding to the real” and to some extent by the social and physical conditions of viewing. The problem is particularly acute for histories of national cinemas, because here issues of representation and the complex configurations of social and textual subjectivities are so often reduced to the necessary fictions of national identity. It would seem unnecessarily sectarian to attempt to account historically for the experience of early cinema in Scotland without giving some account of the films that were being seen and in particular of trying to place the Scottish-produced or Scottish-themed films within the spectrum of the cinemagoing experience. In the project, we have been attentive to the various attempts by Scottish production companies to institute a production sector and to the reasons why these attempts have failed to break into sustainable production even at the national level in the face of the increasing global dominance of Hollywood. We have also been particularly attentive to the local topicals, usually made by cinema managers to attract customers – “Have You Been Cinematographed Yet?” “See Yourselves As Others See You” – which are evidence both of the enterprise of the showmen and exhibitors and of a continuing fascination with the local and the everyday which seems to bring more evidence of the cinema as modern than the romances of Scottish film fiction. But at the same 52

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time, we have tried to develop a comprehensive filmography of European and American fiction films in which Scottish themes, Scottish characters, or Scottish locations seem to be a definitive element. Here, we have adopted a trade definition of “Scottishness,” identifying through reviews of trade screenings those “Scotch” elements that make the films marketable: films, that is to say, that have been “Scotched” (to get double value from the term). With respect to these films, about 200 of them between 1905 and 1927, we have adopted an “ethics” of description, using contemporary trade press reviews to describe them historically rather than imposing a critical language on them: a kind of “remote reading,” as a variant on Franco Moretti’s “distant reading” (2013), in which the “meanings” of the films, the majority of which are no longer available for viewing, are read remotely and historically through contemporary trade critical language. Scotland is distinctive in having a secure place in the mythos of world romanticism, through Walter Scott, and an equally secure place in popular entertainment, through the ubiquitous Harry Lauder and the popularity of Scottish songs in international parlor music. Against this, however, it does not have a secure and sustainable national film industry to recount its own narratives. Scotland, like the American West, is much filmed, but from elsewhere, as an imprecise location, geographically and historically unfixed, a European boundary between the wilderness and civilization. For precisely this reason, as well as confining our engagement with feature films historically to the trade discourse about them, we have also been attentive to the evidence that spectators may not have been passive before the trade’s “preferred readings.” “We do not all wear kilts and Glengarry bonnets,” says the Scottish correspondent of The Bioscope: We have had Peggy [Triangle, 1916], now are given A Daughter of Macgregor [Famous Players, 1916], and, in the near future, are to have Mary Pickford in The Pride of the Clan [Pickford, 1917], and the Scottish dress in each will be a laughing stock to every Scottish man and woman who sees them. (“Scottish Notes,” The Bioscope, 1 February 1917) So, the attention to films does not promote an argument about identity. It is an argument about the play of subjectivities; about the binding of fantasy to the real through recognition, misrecognition, and the refusal to recognize; about the social subjectivities which the conditions of early cinemagoing put into play; and about the ways in which subjectivities were marketed and distributed. Finally, reflecting on the project, I return to the question which was posed in its concluding conference: “What is Cinema History?”5 Cinema history is no longer Carr’s individual historian, who gets the kinds of facts he or she wants and turns them into a singular act of interpretation. The resources of the web and the particular configurations of digital humanities are transformative. They make it much more difficult to use Strachey’s mischievous ignorance as a first requisite, simplifying and clarifying the data, with a “placid perfection,” to make a story out of the ocean. New cinema history is now much more about networking, about collaboration, about buckets full of data, and about navigating repositories which someone else may want to work with to produce a new map. The “Early Cinema in ­Scotland” project had much less to do with the plenitude of historical narratives or national identities than I might have anticipated. Instead, it has to do with networks of information, with geographies of local experience which break up the national map, with disobedient and untidy subjects, and with the clutter of phenomena that gets in in the way of the narrative, exceeds identity, and snags the singular interpretation. 53

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Notes 1 “Early Cinema in Scotland, 1896–1927” was funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council; AH/I020535/1, 2012–2015. See http://earlycinema.gla.ac.uk/ [Accessed 20 November 2018]. 2 For one of the few other women filmmakers (the only one recorded in the trade press), see Jessica Borthwick at the Women and Silent British Cinema website at: https://womenandsilentbritish cinema.wordpress.com/the-women/jessica-borthwick/. [Accessed 25 February 2016] 3 With kind permission of Shetland Archive. 4 For the significance of “theatricality” and “absorption,” see Fried (1980). See also Rushton (2004). 5 “What is Cinema History?”, a joint conference between the HoMER network and the “Early Cinema in Scotland” project, University of Glasgow, 22–24 June 2015.

References Allen, R.C. (2011) “Reimagining the History of the Experience of Cinema in a Post-Moviegoing Age.” In R. Maltby, D. Biltereyst, and Ph. Meers (eds.) Explorations in New Cinema History: Approaches and Case Studies. Malden, MA: Blackwell (pp. 41–57). Benjamin, W. (1973) “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” [first published, 1936]. In H. Arendt (ed.) Illuminations. London: Fontana/Collins (pp. 217–252). Carr, E.H. (2001) What is History? [first published, 1961] Basingstoke: Palgrave. Crawford, R. (2009) “Country Lear.” Review of Margery Palmer McCulloch, Scottish ­Modernism and Its Contexts 1918–1959, Times Literary Supplement 6 November. Devine, T.M. (1999) The Scottish Nation, 1700–2000. Harmondsworth: Penguin Press. See particularly, Chapter 5, “The Parish State” (pp. 84–104). Fried, M. (1980) Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Maltby, R. and Stokes, M. (2007) “Introduction.” In R. Maltby, M. Stokes, and R.C. Allen (eds.), Going to the Movies: Hollywood and the Social Experience of Cinema. Exeter: Exeter University Press (pp. 1–22). Moretti, F. (2013) Distant Reading. London: Verso. Nowell-Smith, G. (1990) “On History and the Cinema.” Screen 13(2): 160–171. Rubin, M. (2002) “What Is Cultural History Now?” In D. Cannadine (ed.) What is History Now. ­Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan (pp. 80–94). Rushton, R. (2004) “Early, Classical and Modern Cinema: Absorption and Theatricality.” Screen 45(3): 226–244. Strachey, L. (2003) Eminent Victorians [first published, 1918]. London: Continuum. White, H. (1978) Tropics of Discourse. Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins University Press.

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5 The new nontheatrical cinema history? Gregory A. Waller

As evidenced most convincingly in the case studies gathered in a series of anthologies, the new cinema history (NCH) has staked out expansive and rich terrain, covering, on the one hand, “economic, industrial, institutional history” focused on distribution and exhibition and, on the other hand, the “socio-cultural history” of audiences, with moviegoing understood as being fully enmeshed in the “conditions of everyday life” (Maltby and Stokes, 2007: 2–4). Ideology and aesthetics, representation and narration, paratexts and promotional strategies, filmmakers and production cultures – these familiar objects of scholarly attention are displaced from the center of concern. The picture show and, even more specifically, the movie theater in one way or another comes to the fore as the “nodal point” in much NCH research, figuring prominently as the target and delivery point of circulation and the social site where cinema was experienced (Klenotic, 2011: 79). This attention to the movie theater is entirely warranted and links NCH projects relying on extensive databases or geographic information system (GIS) technology to a longer tradition of studying film exhibition. But cinema, I have argued elsewhere, has always been multi-sited, with motion pictures exhibited and discursively promoted as being screenable at a variety of sites for different purposes under different auspices to different types of audiences (Waller, 2012). We can examine the history of multi-sited cinema in terms of, for example, types of venues (the theater, the home, the penitentiary, the classroom, the church), types of sponsors (businesses, religious organizations, state agencies, educational institutions), or types of programming practices (the feature film coupled with short subjects, the illustrated lecture, and the ten- to ­t wenty-­m inute film plus discussion). Within the broader framework of multi-sited cinema, nontheatrical, which began to be employed more commonly as a term in the United States during the 1920s, remains a useful, indeed necessary, general category and inclusive concept for thinking about cinema history, provided that we keep in mind that what constituted the nontheatrical (in practice and in print discourse) was not stable or static but varied over time and from place to place, not least because the portability of certain projectors from the mid-1910s onward offered the promise of a virtually unlimited array of screening sites. And, particularly germane to the topic at hand, until the rollout of commercial television, the nontheatrical was understood and practiced in relation to the more ubiquitous, more culturally prominent theatrical modes of film exhibition. Yet the division between the theatrical and the nontheatrical was always subject to redefinition, contestation, policing, blurring, or erasure. 55

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This last point is apparent in certain NCH essays that take up film exhibition outside of movie theaters. Kate Bowles, for example, examines a “16mm picture show run [by unpaid volunteers] for profit but not as a commercial proposition” in a remote Australian community during the 1950s, which she identifies as an example of a “marginally theatrical enterprise” (2011: 316–317). Arthur Knight describes the screenings at a “colored” high school in segregated Williamsburg, Virginia, from 1941 to 1955 as “semi-commercial movie exhibition” (2011: 235). And Stefan Moitra concludes that the regularly scheduled film exhibition in South Wales Miners’ Institutes “was not an alternative to ‘proper’ cinema, it was cinema,” while still remaining distinct from commercial movie theaters in that the Institutes had a “democratic, non-profit, grassroots structure of cinema operation” (2012: 110–111). Casting light on the fringes of more mainstream exhibition practices, these case studies open up a rich line of inquiry concerning “regular film-screening venues” (Biltereyst, Meers, and Van de Vijver, 2011: 104) that were distinguished from theatrical cinema by location, by being nonprofit or by being offered as a sort of community service. But there is another, less direct and potentially more generative way of bringing the NCH to bear on the history of nontheatrical cinema: that is, by juxtaposing the public sites and occasions of film screenings beyond the movie theater with NCH’s overarching priorities and practices – as articulated in Richard Maltby’s “New Cinema Histories” essay and made concrete in most of the essays in two ambitious anthologies, Explorations in New Cinema History (Maltby, Biltereyst, and Meers, 2011) and Cinema, Audiences and Modernity: New Perspectives on European Cinema History (Biltereyst, Maltby, and Meers, 2012). In effect, I am asking here whether there can be a “new nontheatrical cinema history.” In exploring this question, I will use as my primary example the deployment and proposed uses of motion pictures by churches during the 1910s and 1920s (see Lindvall, 2007a, 2007b).

Theaters and nontheaters Taking cinema to be above all a “commercial institution,” NCH attends to the circulation of, demand for, and box office success of films – grouped, for example, as “top grossing films outside the United States and Canada” in 1977–1981 (Krämer, 2011: 175) or as “films screened at least once in 1934 in suburban theaters in Sydney Australia” (Sedgwick, 2011: 151). But NCH has shown little interest in films as individual texts to be interpreted with the aim of understanding the history of spectatorship, social values, production practices, or the commercial motion picture industry at large. Histories of nontheatrical cinema have proceeded from the same premise (see Slide, 1992), although some recent scholarship has challenged the notion that films and genres intended specifically for nontheatrical use do not warrant close textual analysis (see essays in Acland and Wasson, 2011; Orgeron, ­Orgeron, and Streible, 2012). A good argument can also be made that individual films exhibited in “ethnic” theaters specializing in foreign-language films also warrant textual analysis, as J.  Brandon Colvin (2013) shows in his study of a Chicago venue devoted to Swedish-­ language films in the 1930s. Similarly, the specific ways that programs were tailored for use in classrooms or traveling rural health campaigns, for example, can reveal much about nontheatrical exhibition as a sponsored, targeted event. In practice, the important distinction that Maltby categorically draws between the history of film as an aesthetic and ideological “signifying system” and the history of cinema as a commercial institution has meant that the NCH pays particular attention to the exhibition and distribution of film locally, regionally, nationally, and internationally. Equally important, cinemagoing needs to be understood, Maltby insists, as a “regular and frequent 56

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social activity,” with “historical [cinema] audiences” located “specifically in space and time” (2011: 13). For examining the conjoined history of cinema as commercial institution and the history of the social practice of cinemagoing, the movie theater is an all-important nexus: distributors aimed toward systematically delivering films in the most profitable manner to movie theaters, which, as everyday sites of consumption, are unquestionably significant as entry points if we seek to understand the “immediate social, cultural and economic contexts of individual acts of cinemagoing” (Maltby, 2011: 29). Given these connected assumptions about the sociality of cinemagoing and the role of theaters whose business it was to screen movies, the nontheatrical cinema poses an interesting challenge for NCH. The potential difficulty arises not so much in terms of examples of what Bowles calls “marginally theatrical” exhibition (Bowles, 2011: 316), but with those cases where the nontheatrical was positioned as distinct from, different from, or even opposed to the theatrical. Unlike other types of screening sites, virtually all movie theaters after the nickelodeon era had names, locations, visibility, and some measure of permanence; they opened and they shut down; they could be listed in various sources by street, neighborhood, town, city, or state; they could be categorized as part of a chain or as independents, first-run or third-run, and so on. But examining the practice of nontheatrical cinema historically requires an important preliminary step that we take for granted when it comes to movie theaters: identifying actual screening sites and occasions – necessarily drawn, in this case, from the almost unlimited range of possibilities for setting up a film projector in the world outside the theater. Invaluable for finding instantiation of the nontheatrical in practice are searchable ­d igital archives covering motion picture trade magazines, specialized journals (on visual ­education, for example, or advertising), and, especially, daily and weekly newspapers. Of course, ­for-profit (like newspaper.com) and free (like chroniclingamerica1 from the Library of Congress) databases, while boasting of access to hundreds of millions of pages, offer an unevenly incomplete and unrepresentative sample of American newspapers and periodicals (see Moore, 2011 for an excellent assessment of newspapers as primary sources). Moreover, it is impossible to estimate what percentage of nontheatrical screenings went unmentioned in print. However many instances of exhibition beyond the movie theater from 1915 or 1926 we come upon, we will never be able to map or quantitatively describe the field of the nontheatrical with anywhere near the precision, detail, and comprehensiveness that we can bring to the theatrical (see, for instance, the two impressive databases covering the cinemas and their programming strategies in Ghent, utilized by Biltereyst, Meers, and Van de Vijver, 2011). There is a significant gap in what we could call the quantifiability of nontheatrical versus theatrical cinema – a gap that registers particularly since NCH aims, in Maltby’s phrase, to “integrate quantitative information with qualitative analysis” (2011: 34). Yet from existing digitized sources, we can, for example, identify a host of individual churches across different denominations, regions, and population centers in the United States that made use of motion pictures in the 1910s and 1920s. Depending on the amount of information available in the print record, these searches of digital archives can open up prospects for the sort of microhistorical projects focusing on the particular and the local that characterizes a good deal of NCH research – and the historical study of film exhibition more generally. Consider, for example, the case of the First Methodist Episcopal Church, then the largest of seventeen Protestant churches in Bakersfield, California, which in 1915 had a population of around 15,000 served by four commercial film venues and was in the midst of a significant oil-driven economic boom. (Not surprisingly, no relevant records are available for this church; 57

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all the information I summarize here comes from local newspapers, the Bakersfield Californian and the Bakersfield Morning Echo.) In November 1914, First Methodist Episcopal decided to purchase a projector for screenings in the church’s 400-seat Sunday school assembly room, sometimes referred to as an auditorium, a space that had often been used by the church for civic, social, and cultural outreach to a broader population. To waylay any safety concerns, the Powers Cameragraph projector purchased was mounted in a steel booth attached to the exterior of the building, which allowed the image to be projected through a window into the auditorium. First Methodist premiered its new technology with what it billed as a “grand moving picture concert” involving a special screening of a hand-colored film of The Passion Play (it is not clear what specific version was shown), coupled with an eight-part musical program performed by members of the congregation. During 1915, this church experimented with Friday evening “entertainments” featuring motion pictures geared toward the community at large. Most frequently, however, film was used during the morning Sunday school session. This pedagogical practice continued at First Methodist Episcopal well into the 1920s, according to weekly notices in the Bakersfield Californian, which also provides information about Sunday school screenings at another of the city’s churches as well as the occasional visiting lecturer, including a representative of the Laymen’s Missionary movement who arrived in 1917, carrying his own projector to screen films of missionary work in Japan and the Philippines to a multidenominational audience at the local Presbyterian church (Figure 5.1). While a microhistorical approach to the nontheatrical is both necessary and productive, it is worth keeping in mind the broader national perspective when it comes to highlighting individual churches, schools, or asylums that deployed motion pictures. According to an

Figure 5.1  Brochure for Bakersfield First Methodist Episcopal Church, circa 1915. The Sunday School Assembly Hall served as the screening site

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official government tabulation, Bakersfield’s First Methodist Episcopal Church was in 1916 one of 226,718 churches, representing 200 denominations, in the United States. By 1926, the number of churches had increased to 232,154. More than 80 percent of these churches offered Sunday schools. There is no telling how many individual churches in the 1910s or 1920s owned motion picture projectors, welcomed traveling exhibitors, or incorporated “visual education” in their Sunday school lessons. And the situation would definitely have changed significantly by the mid-1930s with the more widespread use of 16 mm. In addition, we should note that this Census specifically excluded organizations that “supplement the work of the churches” like the American Bible Society, the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, and – most notably – the Young Men’s Christian Association, which had a significant commitment to using motion pictures (United States, 1928: 3). Microhistorical inquiry should, Maltby argues, “have the capacity for comparison, aggregation and scaling” so as to allow for necessary “comparative analysis” that bridges localities and theaters (2011: 13; see also Knight, 2011: 228). What kinds of aggregation and comparative analysis are possible with nontheatrical cinema, given the currently available digital resources? No doubt there is much to be gained from comparing the specific way that films were used by First Methodist Episcopal with, say, screenings during 1915 at the Christian Church in San Bernardino, California; Christ Presbyterian Church in Madison, Wisconsin; and the Immaculate Heart of Mary Catholic church in San Antonio, Texas. Researching each of these sites would help expand our sense of the historically grounded parameters of possibility for nontheatrical cinema in the mid-1910s. But the aggregated information drawn from different microhistories will not lead to a fine-grained, authoritative overview or to quantitatively demonstrable claims about how motion pictures were used by churches across denominations and locations in 1915, much less to claims about the broader expanse of nontheatrical exhibition beyond church sanctuaries, classrooms, and auditoriums.

Regularity and frequency: cinemagoing as a social, everyday activity However partial and random, information about the use of motion pictures in and by churches during the 1910s and 1920s is much easier to come by than information about the people who attended these and a host of other screenings outside of movie theaters. But “historical audiences” are – with the movie theater – at the center of much NCH scholarship, which sees commercial film industries as cultivating “the habit of cinemagoing” as a localized, everyday “social activity” that is “regular and frequent” (Maltby, 2011: 14). John Sedgwick’s research, for example, uses various statistical methods to measure the popularity of films and in so doing to demonstrate that even with “cinema’s mass popularity,” audience tastes could still “differ from territory to territory” (2011: 140). Adding nontheatrical film viewing to the NCH equation opens up a number of important questions concerning the experiences of historical audiences, including what counts as regularity and frequency? Would watching films nontheatrically offer anything that approximated what Robert Allen calls the “experience of cinema,” “poised between the everyday and the extraordinary” (2011: 52)? When and where would nontheatrical screenings have fallen within the orbit of the everyday? When and for whom would the experience of motion pictures outside the movie theater have been extraordinary, remarkable, eventful? How varied was the sociality experienced by groups of people who watched films as part of Sunday school or in a department store or in a makeshift “theater” set up in a convention hall? Can we even speak of cinemagoing or moviegoing in situations where audiences were captive (like students in a school room or inmates in a penitentiary) or when the screening of motion pictures was not the focal point or the primary draw of either the site or the occasion? 59

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While I would argue that we definitely need to expand our conception of the history of cinema to include the full range of screenings and uses of motion pictures, must we also expand cinemagoing to include the activity of young people in Bakersfield who made it to First Methodist Episcopal on Sunday mornings in time to see a reel or two of motion pictures as part of Sunday school lesson, before the choir performed and the minster delivered his sermon? It would be difficult to stretch the definition of cinemagoing to include this instance of attending a screening and experiencing motion picture. But exhibiting film at First Methodist Presbyterian and untold other nontheatrical sites still does underscore – if only by way of dramatic contrast – what Allen describes as the “relational, heterogeneous and open character of the historical experience of cinema” (2011: 55).

Distribution For theatrical cinema, it was the system of distribution that enabled and managed the steady flow of different films to individual movie theaters, thereby positioning theaters within a broader network and, more importantly, creating the conditions for cinemagoing to become a “regular and frequent social activity.” Distribution – the least studied branch of the ­industry – becomes a central concern for NCH (see chapters in Part III), as evidenced in research like Maltby’s work on Hollywood’s Standard Exhibition Contract in the 1920s as well as microhistories that explore how distribution operated during specific historical periods and for particular communities in the Netherlands, Czechoslovakia, and Australia (see Pafort-­Overduin, 2011; Verhoeven, 2011; Walsh, 2011; Skopal, 2012; Maltby, 2013). As this scholarship convincingly demonstrates, in-depth empirical research on the logistics and strategies of commercial distribution is crucial for thinking historically about the way films moved within regions and nations as well as across borders. For nontheatrical as much as theatrical cinema, distribution was essential, since films (unless part of an in-house library) were booked for a certain number of screenings and shipped to and from specific locations, regardless of whether exhibitors paid a flat rental fee, a percentage of the box office, or were charged nothing except transportation costs. Given the distribution possibilities in the 1910s, Bakersfield’s First Methodist Episcopal likely obtained at least some of the titles it screened from a commercial film exchange. How widespread was this practice? Did it typically involve different churches using the same films for similar purposes? By the end of the decade, Lyne Shackleford Metcalfe’s guidebook, Showing Movies for Profit – in School and Church, explained that the “local exchange of the big [theatrical] producer” remained a prime source of films for nontheatrical exhibition, but Metcalfe also emphasized what would remain a frequent complaint: “it is chiefly the lack of any well-organized agency for the distribution of films for church and school which has had a tendency to retard the full use of moving pictures in institutions” (1919: 68, 65). In place of the grand “agency” of “organized” exchanges run by the likes of Pathé and Paramount, the nontheatrical field seemed to have welcomed (or at least to have attracted) much smaller distributors, who often specialized in a specific type of film, aimed to service a fairly discrete geographical area, or targeted one sector of the nontheatrical market. Added to the mix were business or industrial concerns that had invested in their own motion pictures and quite often also handled the distribution of these “free” promotional or public relations productions. These many distributors left few historical traces, beyond the print record of advertisements, press releases, and catalogs. Thus, while NCH can approach the study of theatrical distribution with quite reliable (and accessible) basic information about the films released by a studio in a given week, month, or year, the location of film exchanges, and the 60

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general workings of the commercial distribution system for nontheatrical distribution, all this information remains to be gathered and pieced together, so far as is possible. To return to my primary example, consider the circulation of “religious” films suitable for screening in churches, a category or genre that very much remained subject to redefinition in the 1910s–1920s. The year 1915, for instance, saw various attempts at serving the church market, including the Church and Social Service Bureau in New York City and the high-profile failure of what Motion Picture News called a “visionary” scheme by the Duke of Manchester’s International Education League to supply religious and educational pictures (“Manchester’s $10,000,000 Film Vision Vanishes,” 1915). With the appearance of Moving Picture Age and the beginning of a nontheatrical trade press in the late 1910s came not only the regular publication of personal testimonies by ministers who were successfully using motion pictures but also advertisements for ambitious distribution companies specifically targeting churches, like the Community Motion Picture Bureau and Screen Entertainment Distributors, which promised a range of options, including “recreational” programs suitable for screening to children and families. By the 1926 edition of 1000 and One: The Blue Book for Non-Theatrical Films (the most ambitious and comprehensive resource in the field), 99 titles were grouped under the category of “Religious,” while more than 200 additional titles were cross-listed, including scenics, films about Palestine, “juvenile” and “general” entertainment, and “sociology” films. These church-worthy motion pictures were, the Blue Book indicated, handled by a host of different distributors, with certain companies, like the Chicago-based Pilgrim Photoplay Exchange, aiming specifically at churches. Even a cursory look at the trade press discourse and the material produced by distributors over the next five decades indicates that “religious” films remained a primary genre and that churches would continue to constitute a significant, demarcated sector of the nontheatrical. For instance, Twyman Films (based in Dayton, Ohio) in 1966 released its “32nd Year ­Catalog of Religious Films,” containing over 500 titles, some dating back to the 1930s, drawn from a variety of sources, including denominational groups (like the Southern Baptist Convention), mainstream commercial companies (like Walt Disney Productions), and companies specializing in this genre (like Family Films). Taking reference books, advertisements, and catalogs into account as primary sources underscores that “religious” films constitute a historically variable corpus of motion pictures, including at any given time and place both new releases and “evergreen” films that could have been in circulation for years, with titles drawn from commercial theatrical producers as well as a range of other sources.

Conclusion Microhistorical inquiry, the use of quantitative data, the focus on the temporal and spatial grounding of film exhibition, the social experience of audiences, and the workings of ­d istribution – all these emphases of NCH provide models and directions for researching the history of nontheatrical cinema. Yet the vast world of sites and practices outside the movie theater cannot simply be taken as one more object of NCH’s scholarly gaze. Far surpassing the diversity so evident among movie theaters, from the small-town picture show to the urban picture palace, the nontheatrical offers a virtually unlimited range of exhibition sites – and an array of distinctive screening practices and programming strategies. The great percentage of these sites, occasions, and practices remains still to be identified and examined, as do the different sorts of social experiences encouraged or allowed by nontheatrical exhibition, which was not always frequent, regularized, or incorporated into everyday life and was quite often acknowledged in some fashion to be a sponsored event. Similarly, researching 61

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nontheatrical distribution requires identifying the companies, agencies, institutions, and individuals involved, as well as considering how films were marketed to and reached exhibitors. This research could very well lead to databases that provide us with a better sense of precisely what titles were in circulation at a given time and in a given place and how these films were grouped according to subject, genre, use, and target audience. Spurred by NCH, new research on the history of nontheatrical cinema can serve as a way of engaging the working principles and practices of NCH, while expanding the scope of what we take to constitute cinema and its histories.

Note 1 http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/ [Accessed 20 November 2018].

References Acland, C. and Wasson, H. (eds.) (2011) Useful Cinema. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Allen, R. (2011) “Reimagining the History of the Experience of Cinema.” In R. Maltby, D. B ­ iltereyst, and Ph. Meers (eds.) Explorations in New Cinema History: Approaches and Case Studies. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell (pp. 41–57). Biltereyst, D., Maltby, R., and Meers, Ph. (eds.) (2012) Cinema, Audiences and Modernity. New York, NY: Routledge. Biltereyst, D., Meers, Ph., and Van de Vijver, L. (2011) “Social Class, Experiences of Distinction and Cinema in Postwar Ghent.” In R. Maltby, D. Biltereyst, and Ph. Meers (eds.) Explorations in New Cinema History: Approaches and Case Studies. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell (pp. 101–124). Bowles, K. (2011) “The Last Bemboka Picture Show: 16mm Cinema as Rural Community Fundraiser in the 1950s.” In R. Maltby, D. Biltereyst, and Ph. Meers (eds.) Explorations in New Cinema History: Approaches and Case Studies, Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell (pp. 310–321). Colvin, J. (2013) “Examining Ethnic Exhibition: The Success of Scandinavian-Language Films at Chicago’s Julian Theater in the 1930s.” Film History 25(3): 90–125. Educational Screen (1926) 1000 and One: The Blue Book of Non-Theatrical Films. Chicago, IL: Educational Screen. Klenotic, J. (2011) “Putting Cinema History on the Map: Using GIS to Explore the Spatiality of Cinema.” In R. Maltby, D. Biltereyst, and Ph. Meers (eds.) Explorations in New Cinema History: Approaches and Case Studies. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell (pp. 58–84). Knight, A. (2011) “Searching for the Apollo: Black Moviegoing and its Contexts in the Small-Town US South.” In R. Maltby, D. Biltereyst, and Ph. Meers (eds.) Explorations in New Cinema History: Approaches and Case Studies. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell (pp. 226–242). Krämer, P. (2011) “Hollywood and Its Global Audiences: A Comparative Study of the Biggest Box Office Hits in the United States and Outside the United States Since the 1970s.” In R. Maltby, D. Biltereyst, and Ph. Meers (eds.) Explorations in New Cinema History: Approaches and Case Studies. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell (pp. 171–184). Lindvall, T. (2007a) Sanctuary Cinema: Origins of the Christian Film Industry. New York, NY: NYU Press. Lindvall, T. (2007b) “Sundays in Norfolk: Toward a Protestant Utopia Through Film Exhibition in Norfolk, Virginia, 1910–1920.” In R. Maltby, M. Stokes, and R. Allen (eds.) Going to the Movies: Hollywood and the Social Experience of Cinema. Exeter: University of Exeter Press (pp. 76–93). Maltby, R. (2011) “New Cinema Histories.” In R. Maltby, D. Biltereyst, and P. Meers (eds.) Explorations in New Cinema History: Approaches and Case Studies. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell (pp. 3–40). Maltby, R. (2013) “The Standard Exhibition Contract and the Unwritten History of the Classical Hollywood Cinema.” Film History 25(1–2): 138–153. Maltby, R. and M. Stokes (2007) “Introduction.” In R. Maltby, M. Stokes, and R. Allen (eds.) Going to the Movies: Hollywood and the Social Experience of Cinema. Exeter: University of Exeter Press (pp. 1–22). Maltby, R., Biltereyst, D., and Meers, Ph. (eds.) (2011) Explorations in New Cinema History: Approaches and Case Studies. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell.

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The new nontheatrical cinema history? “Manchester’s $10,000,000 Film Vision Vanishes.” Motion Picture News 10(14) (1915), 40. Metcalfe, L. (1919) Showing Movies for Profit – in School and Church. Chicago, IL: Class Publications. Moitra, S. (2012) “‘The Management Committee Intend to Act as Ushers’: Cinema Operation and the South Wales Miners’ Institutes in the 1950s and 1960s.” In D. Biltereyst, R. Maltby, and Ph.  Meers (eds.) Cinema, Audiences and Modernity: New Perspectives on European Cinema History. ­L ondon: ­Routledge (pp. 99–114). Moore, P. (2011) “The Social Biograph: Newspapers as Archives of the Regional Mass Market for Movies.” In R. Maltby, D. Biltereyst, and Ph. Meers (eds.) Explorations in New Cinema History: Approaches and Case Studies. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell (pp. 263–279). Orgeron, D., Orgeron, M., and Streible, D. (eds.) (2012) Learning with the Lights Off: Educational Film in the United States. New York, NY: Oxford. Pafort-Overduin, C. (2011) “Distribution and Exhibition in the Netherlands, 1934–1936.” In R. Maltby, D. Biltereyst, and Ph. Meers (eds.) Explorations in New Cinema History: Approaches and Case Studies. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell (pp. 125–139). Sedgwick, J. (2011) “Patterns in First-Run and Suburban Filmgoing in Sydney in the mid-1930s.” In R. Maltby, D. Biltereyst, and Ph. Meers (eds.) Explorations in New Cinema History: Approaches and Case Studies. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell (pp. 140–158). Slide, A. (1992) Before Video: A History of the Non-Theatrical Film. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. Skopal, P. (2012) “The Cinematic Shapes of the Socialist Modernity Programme: Ideological and Economic Parameters of Cinema Distribution in the Czech Lands, 1948–70.” In D. Biltereyst, R.  Maltby, and Ph. Meers (eds.) Cinema, Audiences and Modernity: New Perspectives on European ­Cinema History. London: Routledge (pp. 81–98). United States. (1928) Census of Religious Bodies 1926. Washington, DC: Dept. of Commerce. Verhoeven, D. (2011) “Film Distribution in the Diaspora: Temporality, Community and National Cinema.” In R. Maltby, D. Biltereyst, and Ph. Meers (eds.) Explorations in New Cinema History: Approaches and Case Studies. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell (pp. 243–260). Waller, G. (2012) “Locating Early Non-Theatrical Audiences.” In I. Christie (ed.) Audiences: Defining and Researching Screen Entertainment Reception. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press (pp. 80–95). Walsh, M. (2011) “From Hollywood to the Garden Suburb (and Back to Hollywood): Exhibition and Distribution in Australia.” In R. Maltby, D. Biltereyst, and Ph. Meers (eds.) Explorations in New Cinema History: Approaches and Case Studies. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell (pp. 159–170).

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Part II

Challenges and opportunities Introduction

The chapters in this part reflect upon the new research conditions for today’s cinema ­h istorian. Introducing concrete empirical work, these contributions explore and illustrate how recent changes in research infrastructure, conditions, and mentalities offer new methodological challenges and opportunities in order to rethink and rewrite our understanding of cinema’s past. Within the field of film and cinema studies, new cinema history is probably the perspective most open to exploring opportunities offered by digitization – a tendency which has revolutionized other fields within the humanities and the social sciences over the past decade. One aspect of digitization is the growing availability of digitized research ­m aterial, including huge numbers of films made accessible by archives, public libraries, m ­ edia corporations, or websites for general audiences. The first chapter in this part demonstrates that in addition to digitally available films, other types of digitized material such as newspapers and magazines are crucial tools for contemporary cinema historians. Reflecting upon his work on the ­h istory of popular American film culture in the mid-1910s, Richard Abel argues that fan magazines, as well as daily and weekly newspapers, played a primary role in offering “menus” by which readers could make sense of the complexity of modern urban life. Abel’s work on the symbiotic relationship between newspapers and motion pictures shows how newspapers in particular had a continuing impact in shaping early American film culture, and how intensively they mediated between producers, distributors, exhibitors, and fans. Abel’s chapter, which integrates several concrete case studies, not only strongly illustrates the intersection of a city’s cinema culture with the movie industry as a whole but also argues more broadly for understanding cinema and cinema history in a wider constellation – with cinema’s history intensively linked to the history of other leisure activities and to urban economic and labor history. In the second chapter, Eric Hoyt reflects upon some of the most powerful research tools which have enriched the field in recent years: the Media History Digital Library and the data mining platforms Lantern and Arclight, which enable researchers to explore the dozens of digitized magazines and trade papers available through the digital library. In his contribution, Hoyt, who helped to develop these powerful open source platforms, forcefully argues that thanks to the opportunities of digital humanities methods and big data analytics, film

 Challenges and opportunities

historians can now explore previously neglected sources on a completely different scale. Researchers can now search large datasets, conduct longitudinal data analysis, zoom in on particular aspects by using keywords, or illuminate particular sources in ways that open up a profoundly new understanding of cinema’s past. Hoyt illustrates his argument on the strong search and analytical power of these new datasets and platforms by focusing on how American exhibitors were visible and influential within the industry between 1915 and 1930 – demonstrating that exhibitor communities very much had their own star systems. For Hoyt, however, it is clear that computational analysis is only one facet of this research; the computer cannot do the interpretive work of constructing a profound historical argument on the institutional, social, cultural, and industrial structures that shape media production, circulation, and reception. The emergence of big datasets and data abundance in new cinema historiography is the starting point of the next chapter, which focuses on the growing interest in comparative research within the field. Looking at what has happened in other disciplines within the humanities and the social sciences, Daniel Biltereyst, Thunnis van Oort, and Philippe Meers argue that comparative approaches are often seen as a sign of a discipline’s growing maturity and methodological sophistication. The chapter looks at cross-cultural comparison as an essential part of new cinema history’s research agenda, alongside data triangulation and comparisons to other forms of leisure. After examining the usage of comparative a­ pproaches in film and cinema studies, the authors deal with several opportunities and pitfalls of cross-­cultural comparative research and distinguish several modes of comparison. The most rigorous method insists on strict data verification and the compatibility of “comparable” types of data, units, and levels of comparison. In their case study on the similarities and differences between ­h istorical cinema cultures in the harbor cities of Antwerp and Rotterdam, ­Biltereyst, van Oort, and Meers illustrate the difficulties of applying this “orthodox” mode and argue that for an emergent field like new cinema history, this rigorous version of ­comparative research is only one of the possible options. Other, methodologically less sophisticated modes of comparison can be beneficial for exploring similarities and differences and for revising ­hypotheses on the historical social experiences of cinema. The chapter’s conclusion is a plea for considering comparison as an iterative process of trial and error. The two last chapters seem to take a completely different perspective from the big data discourse; however, one of the side effects of the computational turn in digital humanities resides in the reevaluation of more traditional case study approaches. Explicitly focusing on the methodological challenges of contextualizing fragmentary evidence of the past, Kathryn Fuller-Seeley offers an in-depth analysis of the business practices of a pioneering itinerant film exhibition troupe. In her chapter, Fuller-Seeley offers a detailed analysis of a troupe’s practices and modus operandi, based on a unique set of recently found archival material from an exhibitor who, along with his wife and a handful of assistants, toured extensively around Iowa and the Midwestern Plains states during cinema’s first decade. The archival material shows how the troupe’s two-hour program incorporated films, music and songs, vaudeville acts, stereopticon slides, lectures, and other performances. Fuller-Seeley’s case study underlines the continuing importance of detailed original archive material, especially when these fragmented sources are interpreted through contextualizing material like local newspapers, which were crucial in publicizing, documenting, and commenting on film exhibition. Very much in line with the previous chapters, the final contribution in this part argues for a social history of cinema’s past, and in her essay, Judith Thissen operationalizes a microhistorical perspective on French postwar rural cinemagoing. In her work on cinema’s contribution to the process of rural modernization, Thissen underlines the continuing usefulness of 66

 Challenges and opportunities

seemingly ephemeral sources: in this case, a set of two postcards showing a tiny rural village in the Nièvre, a département in central France. In her chapter, Thissen reads and contextualizes these cards – one from the early 1900s and the other from the late 1950s – in order to get a grip on the transformation of everyday life in the village. Despite signs of continuity in the village’s spatial structure, the author deconstructs the narrative of prosperity and well-being in the village, with the arrival of electricity, motorized transportation, housing improvement, and signs of a growing mass consumer culture. On the other hand, Thissen claims that broader contextualizing data reveal patterns of rural flight and population decline. The chapter is an exploration of how to integrate microanalytical perspectives and broader social and media historical analysis.

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6 Reading newspapers and writing American silent cinema history Richard Abel

During the past twenty years, newspapers have become an increasingly important resource for the research that I and others have devoted to rethinking and sometimes rewriting ­A merican silent cinema. Initially, our research had to rely on microfilm collections in disparate public libraries and state historical society libraries. As anyone who has used microfilm knows, the reproduction is very uneven in quality, sometimes almost illegible, and lacking all trace of those pages once printed in color. Despite those caveats, microfilm has allowed access to newspapers whose original copies have long disappeared. My own realization of newspapers’ potential probably came when I was seeking evidence of how widely French films circulated in the United States during the first decade of the twentieth century. Almost by chance, I found that evidence, especially for Pathé-Frères films, not only in the trade press but also in vaudeville house and nickelodeon ads, complemented by a few articles, ­ ortland, in metropolitan as well as mid-sized city newspapers, in Chicago, Des Moines, and P Oregon, among others (Abel, 1999). Arguing that “Wild West” films served to counter those French imports and, consequently, made the American cinema really “­A merican,” I wondered if the popularity of westerns (and other “school of action” films) that continued into the early 1910s was framed by and contributed to the broader social, p­ olitical, and cultural process of “Americanization” so endemic at the time. Far more research in n ­ ewspapers across the country, then still on microfilm, produced an extensive database of ads and articles confirming that argument (Abel, 2006). I especially recall finding, in several northeastern Ohio papers, how quickly G.M. Anderson became one of the first American movie stars, not as the more familiar Broncho Billy but rather as the locally dubbed Bullets Anderson. When digitized newspapers began to appear (still too often drawn from microfilm) and then became easily accessible online, my research expanded once again to focus almost exclusively on how papers were covering this new, booming industry for their readers, who also were becoming enthusiastic movie fans.1 Propelling that research were surprising discoveries such as a full Sunday page devoted to the movies, “Right Off the Reel,” and then a daily review column, “Flickers from Filmland,” both of which first appeared in the Chicago Tribune in 1914. This research led to an unexpected argument, recently articulated in Menus for Movieland (Abel, 2015), that weekly and daily newspaper writing played a significant, even defining, role – perhaps equal to that of fan magazines – in the emergence of a popular American film culture in the mid-1910s. The argument assumed that at the turn of the last century, the 68

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primary function of a newspaper was to offer “menus” by which its readers could make sense of the complexity of modern urban life (wherever they were located) and imagine how to order and interpret their own daily lives. Just as large department stores systematized their retail goods into discrete categories (and spaces), so did papers departmentalize their pages into sections, often with their own headings for ease of access. In Sunday editions, those sections could include international and national news, editorials and local news, business and real estate matters, society events and women’s pages, arts and amusements, sports, children’s games, and comics. A new section on automobiles emerged with this industry’s rapid growth between 1905 and 1910. The only other new section, on motion pictures, appeared a few years later, in conjunction with that industry’s equally rapid development. Among the weekly and daily menu items devoted to the movies were full pages, picture theater ads, gossip columns, film reviews, and contests, all of which served to mediate the interests of movie manufacturers and distributors, local exhibitors, and a growing mass audience of fans. ­Surprisingly, young women just entering the profession of journalism – from Gertrude Price, Mae Tinee, and Daisy Dean to Kitty Kelly, Louella O. Parsons, and the “Film Girl”2 – were responsible as editors or writers for many of those menu items, and other young women much of the time seemed to be their targeted readers. As a follow-up to Menus for Movieland, I want to reflect further on the continuing impact that newspapers had in shaping early American film culture and, more specifically, how they mediated the interests of producers, distributors, exhibitors, and fans. That prompts me to propose at least three categories of relevant issues and questions. First, what should we be seeking to know about the cities and towns in which newspapers were a daily ritual for most people, and how might we go about that? Second, what should we try to learn about the newspapers themselves: their owners and publishers, their appearance as morning or evening editions, and their circulation? Third, what should we want to know about how newspapers framed their coverage of motion pictures through Sunday pages, daily columns, and paid advertising, and who edited and wrote those “menu items” for readers? Each category, of course, involves more specific questions, some of which draw on prior research (and methods) from other fields: urban history, journalism history, labor history, and women’s history. Each may also require research in related sources, from the trade press to city maps, directories, and specific historical studies. In order to set manageable limits on setting out and then addressing these questions, I will restrict my focus to two metropolitan centers in the Midwest that have gained little attention in cinema history, Cleveland and Detroit, and narrow that focus even more to 1917–1919, immediately following the period analyzed in Menus for Movieland. Moreover, each city offers a major newspaper to research: the Cleveland Plain Dealer and the Detroit Free Press.3 What data about a city or town could be pertinent to an historical study of the symbiotic relationship between newspapers and motion pictures? Population figures, obviously, including their socioeconomic divisions (class, ethnicity/race, gender, age), their distribution in neighborhoods, and changes over time. The location of commercial centers (beyond a downtown hub) and major businesses (from factories to office buildings), modes of transportation and their networks throughout a city (railroads, streetcars, trucks, and autos), and perhaps zoning laws and policies. In each case, compiling maps could be useful to track and analyze their intra- and interrelations, both spatially and temporally. During the 1910s, Cleveland, for instance, doubled its land mass by annexing suburban towns to the east, south, and west of the downtown area, next to Lake Erie and on the east side of the Cuyahoga River (Van Tassel and Grabowski, 1996). At the same time, the city’s population rose to nearly 800,000 in 1920, swelled by recent immigrants – among whom Poles, Czechs, Slovenes, and Slovaks were prominent – as well as African-American 69

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migrants. As a shipping center by land and lake, the city boasted a diverse economy led by steel foundries, auto and auto supply factories, and manufacturers of machine tools as well as industrial materials and equipment. These were especially concentrated along the lakeshore on Euclid and Superior between East 55th and 77th and south along Broadway and the river, where Polish communities in particular clustered. Farther east at 105th and 107th, Doan’s Corners became “a second downtown” initially serving middle- and upper-class communities in East Cleveland. Other commercial centers developed south and east of those two areas; another, south along Broadway; and at least two more in the west and southwest. An extensive electric streetcar system spread out from downtown to these centers and the outer suburban ring. The Chamber of Commerce, in league with the Republican (largely Protestant) elite, essentially ran a relatively efficient city government. During the same period, Detroit nearly tripled in size, annexing townships (mostly rural) to the northwest, north, and northeast, along major street arteries – Grand River, ­Woodward, and Gratiot, respectively (Zunz, 1982: 286–287, 290). The city’s population doubled to nearly one million by 1920, of whom 25 percent were recent immigrants – with Poles, Hungarians, Slovaks, Slovenes, and Italians especially prominent (Zunz, 1982: 104, 287; Hooker, 1997: 44, 51). They tended to congregate initially in ethnically defined neighborhoods on the near east side of the city and then in Hamtramck and Highland Park on the city’s northern edge and Delray on the western border (Zunz, 1982: 327). Dominating and defining Detroit, the booming automobile industry was led by the Ford Motor Company, which built its Crystal Palace factory in Highland Park next to the rail line encircling the city, and an even larger factory in River Rouge near Delray, and by the Dodge Brothers, whose factory was located on the southern edge of Hamtramck and near a cluster of metal works at the Lake Shore Junction of two other rail lines (Zunz, 1982: 291, 354; Hooker, 1997: 58, 60; Kowalski, 2002: 31; Serafino, 1983). The Employers Association of Detroit was the most “powerful political force in the city,” stifling unionization efforts, and together with the Board of Commerce and Ford’s Sociology Department led a paternalistic effort to train immigrant workers through a strong Americanization Movement.4 As for newspapers, which George Kibbe Turner at the time called “first of all, property – and property dependent on the business advertisement, a thing peculiarly sensitive to attacks on established property rights,”5 who were the owners and publishers? If two or more papers competed for readers within a city or even a region, how were they differentiated? Did those differences involve morning versus evening publication (and their wire-service connection), having or not having a Sunday edition, or something more? What positions did they take on political, economic, social, and/or cultural issues? How did they handle such large-scale events as the Progressive movement and its aftermath, the First World War, the migration and immigration of peoples, women’s suffrage, or even election-year cycles? Finally, what was the circulation of the daily and (if they had them) Sunday newspaper editions, and who seemed to be their principal readers? The Cleveland Plain Dealer was an “independent” paper, yet was politically linked to the liberal wing of the Democratic Party, supporting Woodrow Wilson for President in 1916 and advocating US membership in the League of Nations in 1919 (Shaw, 1942: 315, 319). A morning paper (and member of the Associated Press) with a Sunday edition, it was the second largest in the city after the Cleveland Evening Press and promoted its daily circulation, in 1919, of 168,440.6 Its competing morning daily, also with a Sunday edition, was the initially Progressive Cleveland Leader, whose circulation slowly declined, despite a highly regarded staff of editors and writers, until the Plain Dealer bought it out in 1917.7 Also a morning paper, the Detroit Free Press (an Associated Press member) had the second largest circulation in the city 70

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Figure 6.1 Cleveland Plain Dealer (10 September 1917: 6)

after the Scripps-owned Detroit Evening News.8 Classified as “independent” but politically linked to the conservative wing of the Republican Party (Boles, 2010: 54), the Free Press was clearly the more “upscale” of the two dominant papers, closely aligned with the city’s business interests, as later evidenced in an ad boasting of “more financial advertising” than all other papers in the city combined.9 For several years, the Plain Dealer had been publishing a single Sunday page devoted to motion pictures.10 In September 1916, that coverage expanded to two pages, sponsored by ads from more than a dozen picture theaters.11 While program descriptions supplied by those theaters filled much of those pages and studio-distributed star photos clustered at the top of the first, a column of gossip, bylined “Gertrude,” soon headlined the second.12 By January 1917, shortly after Robert J. Izant became “photoplay editor” and with the support of ads from two dozen picture theaters (the largest from six downtown and three in East Cleveland) and several rental exchanges,13 the paper was giving as much space in its “Cosmopolitan” section to motion pictures as to theater productions14 – and besting the coverage of its rival, the Cleveland Sunday Leader.15 Izant served as photoplay editor into the 71

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summer, also contributing a daily column several times a week,16 until Harlowe R. Hoyt replaced him in early September and expanded the Sunday coverage to three pages, adding a column written by “The Answer Man,” as a complement to “Photo Play Notes,” “Meet the Screen Stars,” and “Do You Remember.”17 These pages remained little changed for the next year or so, with the exception of a local profile column written by Marjorie Daw.18 In early September 1918, when Hoyt turned to editing the theater pages, Daw took over as the photoplay editor – following the lead of other newspaper women in the Midwest, like Mae Tinee at the Chicago Tribune, Louella O. Parsons at the Chicago Herald, Genevieve Harris at the Chicago Post, and Dorothy Day at the Des Moines Tribune 19 – a position Daw held through late summer of the following year.20 In October 1919, W. Ward Marsh became editor of the Sunday section, now extended to four pages, and continued as photoplay editor through the next decade.21 Initially, the Detroit Sunday Free Press printed a very similar single page, headlined “The Screen” and supported by ads from a few prominent theaters that supplied program ­descriptions.22 To be sure, the daily edition offered a short, unattributed “Reel Player” ­column profiling a current star, but the Sunday paper did not expand its coverage to two pages until March 1918 and never named the editor who was compiling all this publicity material.23 Only in late 1918 did new columns begin to appear: “Screen Chat,”24 probably drawn from the trade press or fan magazines, and many one-off wire-service stories such as an interview with Douglas Fairbanks, another on motion pictures and public opinion, and French actor Charles Dullin’s tribute (in translation) to William S. Hart. 25 In January 1919, the Free Press printed “A Cinema Dictionary” that summarized some of the technical terms presumably used in the industry, for the edification of local aspiring screenwriters. 26 Four months later, it began running Karl K. Kitchen’s “entertaining” series of columns that described his month-long “investigation” of the motion picture industry in Southern ­California.27 Finally, in late September, the paper’s Sunday coverage expanded to three pages, yet still without naming an editor, although wire-service stories now had a byline.28 What can one gather from more closely reading each paper’s motion picture pages, c­ olumns, and ads that might add to and even complicate our understanding of American cinema history in the late 1910s? From their ads, both offer a selected database of picture theaters from which to analyze the circulation and promotion of specific films and stars. The Plain Dealer had long given prominence to the downtown theaters as well as others in secondary commercial centers (Figure 6.1); in September 1917, it began printing a daily block ad that categorized two dozen into these locations: “Downtown,” “East End,” and “South and West Side.”29 By June 1918, the block of smaller ads, now uncategorized, numbered fifty, at least a quarter of the city’s ­total.30 Similarly, the Free Press had long counted on the ads from ten picture theaters in or near the downtown center. Not until November 1918 did it finally began printing a similar block of selected neighborhood theater ads, which also numbered no more than ten, only one of which served an ethnic neighborhood, the Iris in the Polish community of Hamtramck and Lake Shore Junction.31 Although neither paper sported many ads from the major producers or distributors, in September 1918, the Free Press was the recipient of a very large Paramount-Artcraft ad bordered by eight ads for its major contracted theaters, including the reopened downtown Regent and the newly opened Lincoln Square on the far west side (Figure 6.2).32 What specific films and stars, at least according to newspaper ads and articles, seemed particularly popular in these two cities? In Cleveland, Theda Bara still enjoyed a strong audience draw. In January 1918, her Cleopatra (Fox, 1917) premiered at the Opera House, and the Chairman of the Ohio Board of Censors praised her convincing, skillful interpretation of this “Serpent of the Old Nile.”33 A slightly reduced version circulated to other theaters, 72

Newspapers and silent cinema history

Figure 6.2  Detroit Sunday Free Press (8 December 1918: 4.15)

including the downtown Orpheum for two weeks, from August through December.34 The patriotic war film, The Unbeliever (Perfection, 1918), also had an extended run, opening at the Priscilla, Mall, and Alhambra in June and, during the next three months, playing at ­others – from the Home in Doan’s Corner to the Cedar (near east side) and the Jennings (near west side).35 In Detroit, Bara seemed even more popular. (Figure 6.3) Beginning in early ­February, ­Cleopatra ran a record three weeks at the Washington and in August returned to that downtown theater as well as to several others in September, coincident with the two-week ­engagement of her Salome (Fox, 1918) at the downtown Adams.36 Two other stars could be singled out: in July 1917, Fairbanks’ Wild and Wooly (Artcraft, 1917) ran for two weeks at the Washington; in March and April 1918, the downtown Orpheum and Regent both had Nazimova’s ­Revelation (Metro, 1918).37 Patriotic war films received even heavier promotion than in Cleveland. (Figure 6.4) Beginning in March, The Unbeliever ran for a record five weeks at the downtown Majestic, where 100,000 people saw it during the first 73

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Figure 6.3  Washington Theater advertisement, Detroit Sunday Free Press (3 February 1918: B7)

three weeks, and continued to circulate to theaters through August.38 Yet other war films were almost as prominent: My Four Years in Germany (First National, 1918), four weeks at the Washington; To Hell with the Kaiser (Metro, 1918), two weeks at the Broadway Strand; and Crashing Through to Berlin (Universal, 1918), one week at the Washington.39 One also cannot ignore D.W. Griffith’s Hearts of the World (Famous Players-Lasky, 1918); premiering for two weeks at the Washington, the film then ran for an astonishing thirteen weeks at the Detroit Opera House.40 Surprisingly, the “upscale” Free Press even carried large ads for several Pathé ­serials – The Fatal Ring (1917), with Pearl White; The Seven Pearls (1917), with Mollie King; and Wolves of Kultur (1918), with Leah Baird (Figure 6.4).41 If newspaper ads and articles offer a good sense of which particular films and stars most attracted moviegoers and to what theaters in a city, could they also give any sense of who those moviegoers were? Film reviewers could, however implicitly, do so through the readers they seemed to address and the language they deployed in describing and evaluating specific films42 but that is rarely the case in either of these newspapers.43 Instead, here one can follow a couple of contests directed at movie fans.44 From mid-January to late March 1918, the Sunday Plain Dealer ran a weekly puzzle contest asking fans to identify a screen star from the photo of part of a face reproduced in its “Pictorial-Feature” section.45 The winner would be named the following week and be awarded six tickets to the downtown Stillman theater. Of the dozen winners named, all but two were women; of those ten, only two were married. Interestingly, half of the winners were from the middle-class far east side of the city, and only two were from the near west side. A short-lived contest followed, asking fans at four or five theaters each week to vote for their favorite star and briefly explain their choice.46 The winner at each theater would receive six tickets for any programs there. This time, the six winners divided equally between women (one married) and men, but again, most lived on the far east side. Perhaps, because Douglas Fairbanks towered “head and shoulders above all other[s],” this contest lasted only two weeks.47 Obviously, one has to be careful making generalizations from such a small sampling, especially given the Plain Dealer’s presumed readership and the choice of designated theaters, all but one of which were downtown or on the east side. Yet not only do these contests attest to the overwhelming lure of young stars 74

Newspapers and silent cinema history

Figure 6.4  Majestic Theater advertisement, Detroit Sunday Free Press (31 March 1918: C9)

for fans, they also suggest, within limits, that young unmarried women continued to be unusually committed moviegoers. Finally, one of the more surprising discoveries is that the newspapers in both cities sponsored the production and distribution of a local newsreel. In late May 1917, the Plain Dealer announced that it was teaming with the Argus Company, “producers of educational and industrial films,” to make and release a weekly Motion Picture Magazine.48 Introduced in early June at two jointly owned theaters – the Mall downtown and the Alhambra in East Cleveland (Euclid and 105th)49 – this newsreel’s bookings steadily increased until, by ­January 1918, it was showing in thirty-three theaters across the city and another twenty-eight throughout northern Ohio (Figure 6.5).50 Many of the former were on the far east side, with half a dozen near a northeastern Polish/Slovak neighborhood and another four not far from Slovak/ Italian/African-American communities on the near east side.51 Some subjects were linked to the war effort: army trucks drove through en route to Paris and (supposedly) Berlin; 300 men from Ann Arbor, Michigan, enrolled in the Naval Reserve Training School; a dirigible dropped Liberty Bond leaflets over the city.52 Most, however, promoted institutions that made “the city a sane place in which to live” (museums, parks, and “industrial plants which make the city famous”), educational topics (a training school teaching English to foreigners and East Technical School students in their foundry), and social events such as the Kocoon Klub Ball.53 In April 1918, the Plain Dealer changed its newsreel’s name to Screen Magazine; within another two months, it was booked into nearly fifty of the city’s theaters; following the November Armistice, its cameramen captured the celebratory “exposition of the United States and the allied nations ... staged on the lake front and at the Central armory” and that footage apparently was exhibited “in Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Chicago.”54 Although it is unclear whether this Screen Magazine was still in circulation past the fall of 1919,55 the Plain Dealer had earlier boasted that a Detroit newspaper had asked to be shown how it too could produce a local newsreel: that paper was the Detroit Free Press.56 In mid-March 1918, the Free Press finally began producing its own weekly Film Edition in conjunction with the Metropolitan Company, well known in the city for “making titles, 75

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Figure 6.5 Cleveland Sunday Plain Dealer (10 June 1917: A10)

slides, and special films for theaters.”57 Initially, the newsreel premiered at the downtown Washington on Sunday, moved to other Kunsky theaters, and transferred to twenty others in the city and elsewhere.58 That summer it shifted its premiere to the Broadway Strand and then circulated to an increasing number of venues in Detroit and southeast Michigan (Figure 6.6).59 As the Great War ended in November 1918, the “Free Press Film Edition” merged with the “Gaumont News and Graphic service,” and for at least a year local stories were combined with “out-of-town” pictures.60 From newspaper ads and articles in the first few months, one can gather a good sense of each week’s issues and, more specifically, when and where they were shown. Subjects related to the war were frequent: for example, the 551st state regiment firing machine guns, Red Cross members making bandages, women driving army trucks through the city on their way to Atlanta, and a 92-year-old woman knitting socks for ­soldiers.61 Yet there were lots of local stories too: a Monarch Steel Casings fire, the golden jubilee of Rev. Fr. Ernest Van Dyke as rector of St. Aloysius, the Tigers-Indians baseball game in Cleveland, and the elite Cross Country Riding Club on a hunt.62 By the summer, the Film Edition was showing at half a dozen theaters on Sunday, then circulating to 76

Newspapers and silent cinema history

Figure 6.6 Detroit Free Press (16 June 1918: C8)

both large and small neighborhood venues throughout the week. Moreover, some twenty of those venues were located in areas populated by Polish, Italian, and Hungarian immigrants – in Lower and Upper Poletown, Hamtramck, Little Italy, and Delray.63 Might this mean that Metropolitan had found a way to expand its business to theaters other than those that could either afford to rent national newsreels or, like Kunsky’s Madison, compile their own?64 The brief analysis of these newsreels leads to at least three points. First, the Plain Dealer would likely see a parallel strategy in the Free Press’s explicit promotion of its “film edition” in relation to its daily morning edition: “It is possible for Detroiters to read of important local events in the morning paper and go to their neighboring theater in the evening and see it in vivid pictures.”65 Second, while both newsreels, as expected, contributed local or regional stories related to the war effort, the Free Press Film Edition often made them a larger part of 77

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each weekly issue. Did these many stories, perhaps implicitly, work in sync with Detroit’s Americanization Movement in helping to gather up recent immigrants as well as citizens into a more or less united nation? Third, both newsreels can be seen as explicit forms of boosterism. In short, they repeatedly served up positive representations of their respective cities, like promotional pictures of an imagined community that excluded almost any sense of economic and social conflicts and problems. For those of us committed to writing and rewriting American silent cinema history, this essay argues that newspapers offer a potentially rich historiographical source for further r­ esearch, whatever their limitations in either microfilm or digital form. To take the latter, far from all papers are digitized, and their selection for digitizing can seem haphazard, depending on the institutions and organizations involved in the selecting and processing as well as on how accessible and searchable they are on websites. If one focuses on the 1910s, moreover, newspapers are less useful for some kinds of history writing than others. They may contribute little to what is now more precisely called film history, if one takes that to mean the aesthetics of analyzing film texts or auteurs. The case studies of Cleveland and ­Detroit newspapers in the late 1910s seem to confirm that, but some earlier instances do provide a counter: that is, in the New York Evening Mail, “Wid” Gunning’s “pantheon” of the top thirty American film directors in early 1915, or, in the Minneapolis Tribune, Philip H. Welsh’s praise for the close shots of “concrete objects” in Lois Weber’s Shoes in late 1916 (Abel, 2015). Turning from film history to cinema history – which, to put it much too simply involves the interaction of audiences with films screened in the spaces of commercial as well as noncommercial places – one begins to find evidence of newspapers’ potential impact and also to realize the need to situate cinema within a larger context. Through newspaper theater advertisements, program synopses, gossip columns, and other publicity material, one can compile a rich database for studying how films and stars circulate within the landscape of a particular city or town over time and how that circulation evokes the industry practices and cultural resonances of their movement (Boutros and Straw, 2010). Such a database can specify how not only individual films but also those of major and ­m inor firms were disseminated as well as where and when they first appeared and then reappeared in other venues. Those patterns of circulation can lead to questions about the relations among rental exchanges, theater chains, and “independent,” usually smaller theaters and about whether or not any venues in ethnic/racial neighborhoods become visible and why. Ads and publicity material can offer information on programming practices, from those few that seem relatively complete (combining a feature with several shorts and music) to most that only single out the attraction of a feature and star. Along with selected photos and gossip items, ads also can suggest what particular stars seemed especially popular with a city’s moviegoers, based on the length of their films’ runs in major theaters, the range of their circulation through other venues, and the prominence a star received in luring fans. From different angles, finally, eventual ads from neighborhood theaters, as in both Cleveland and Detroit, and contests asking readers to identify photos or drawings of stars or films, vote for favorite stars, or even submit short film reviews, as in Cleveland, may even lead to ­hypotheses about the constitution of movie audiences in a city. All of this newspaper discourse opens pathways to the larger context in which American silent cinema not only flourished but also had an impact. One of those pathways explores the intersection of a city’s movie culture and practices with the movie industry as a whole and more broadly with the economic history, including labor history, of the period. Another connects productively with urban history, in particular with the specific demographics of a city’s population and its changes over time. A third situates that newspaper discourse within early twentieth-century journalism history, especially the emergence of mass-market papers 78

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and their editions’ expanding sections targeting a wide swath of readers. A fourth leads to the interrelations between a city’s movie culture, from editors and writers to fans, and early twentieth-century women’s history and the radical transformations taking place in everything from professions and employment to consumption and leisure. In short, this reflection on, and accompanying case studies of, the symbiotic relationship between newspapers and the movies makes one thing more and more clear. Researching the range of these relations in the silent era, and also very likely later, should lead us continually to think of cinema as embedded in a larger context that blurs the difference between writing cinema history and writing cultural, social, and economic history. If, in the silent period, “newspapers made moviegoers,” both readers and fans could not but live within the imbricated, sometimes conflicted levels of circulatory practices in their community environs.

Notes 1 Numerous colleagues encouraged this research, helped uncover resources, and engaged in their own related projects. Among them were Paul S. Moore, Robert C. Allen, Kathryn Fuller-Seeley, Jan Olsson, and Gregory Waller. 2 While Mae Tinee and Kitty Kelly did editorial and review work for the Chicago Tribune and the “Film Girl” wrote a review column for the Syracuse Herald, Gertrude Price and Daisy Dean wrote gossip columns, respectively, for the Scripps-McRae newspaper chain and Central Press Association. 3 The early years of the Cleveland Plain Dealer and Detroit Free Press have been digitized and are accessible on the websites of, respectively, genealogybank.com and the Free Press itself. For further information on and analysis of the Detroit Free Press, see Richard Abel, Motor City Movie Culture, 1916–1925, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2020. 4 For an excellent historical study of the Americanization Movement in Detroit, see Brophy (2003). See also Conot (1974: 154, 178), Zunz (1982: 311–317), and Hooker (1997: 115–117). 5 George Kibbe Turner, “Manufacturing Public Opinion: The New Art of Making Presidents by Press Bureau,” McClure’s Magazine 39.3 ( July 1912): 323. 6 “Motion Picture News First Annual Newspaper and Theater Directory,” Motion Picture News (27 December 1919): 159. 7 See Shaw (1942: 330–331). The Cleveland Evening News was linked, by ownership, with the Leader; in 1917, after the disappearance of the daily edition, the Leader’s Sunday edition continued as the Sunday News-Leader. 8 See Kaplan (2002: 117). The Detroit Tribune, a smaller “upscale” rival to the Free Press, which the News had owned since the early 1890s, was closed down in 1915 – see also Boles (2010: 58). 9 Advertisement, Detroit Free Press (6 June 1922): 11. 10 See the brief analysis of the Cleveland Plain Dealer during this period in Abel (2015: 79–80, 120). 11 “Ohio Has Two Sons and One Daughter on Cleveland Screens This Week” and “Photo Play Gossip and Comment; Film News of Interest to Clevelanders,” Cleveland Sunday Plain Dealer (3 September 1916): Cosmopolitan, 4–5. 12 Gertrude, “Do You Aspire to Be a Moving Picture Actor? List to Eleanor Black,” Cleveland Sunday Plain Dealer (29 October 1916): Cosmopolitan, 5. Never fully named, “Gertrude” sometimes indicated that she was writing from New York. 13 The downtown theaters included the Stillman, Standard, Strand, Orpheum, New Mall, and Reel; those on the far eastside, the Alhambra, Metropolitan, and Knickerbocker; the rental exchanges, Victor Film, Standard Film, and Selznick Productions. Ohio Feature Film (whose advertised titles sound like stag films) briefly placed small ads as well. 14 Robert J. Izant, “Photo Play Theaters Show New Films of Exceptional Standard and Characters,” Cleveland Sunday Plain Dealer (5 November 1916): Cosmopolitan, 4. Izant, “Photo Play Curtains Part to Show a New Character and Several Old Favorites”; Gertrude, “Fannie Ward Expected American Monte Carlo Near Mexican Border”; and “Mme. Nazimova Calls It ‘Photodrama’ and Art,” Cleveland Sunday Plain Dealer (14 January 1917): 4–6. 15 From late 1911 through 1916, the Cleveland Sunday Leader (although much smaller in circulation) had led in its coverage of motion pictures – see Abel (2015: 13–14, 74–77, 119–120, 183–184, 249–251).

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Richard Abel 16 Apparently Izant enlisted in the US Army in July or August – “First Ohio Troops Go South Friday,” Cleveland Plain Dealer (20 August 1917): 1. 17 Harlowe R. Hoyt, “Childhood and Yesterdays Theme Current Programs in Local Pictures Houses,” Cleveland Sunday Plain Dealer (9 September 1917): News Features/Photo Plays, 4. 18 Marjorie Daw, “Cleveland Youth Wins Fame in Screen World,” Cleveland Sunday Plain Dealer (9 June 1918): Editorial/Dramatic, 5, and “Famous Director of Films Claims Cleveland as Home,” Cleveland Sunday Plain Dealer (16 June 1918): Editorial/Dramatic, 5. 19 The Plain Dealer also had its own precedents: a “woman’s edition” written and edited by 200 women in the 1890s, several female city and sports editors, and Ruth Vinson’s brief stint as a film reviewer in 1914. Shaw, 324–325; and Abel, 190. 20 Majorie Daw, “Players of the Shadow World Undimmed by Autumn Days,” Cleveland Sunday Plain Dealer (1 September 1918): Editorial/Dramatic, 4, “Popular Feminine Stars Shown in Pleasing Roles,” Cleveland Sunday Plain Dealer (15 September 1918): Editorial/Dramatic, 3, and “Stars of First Magnitude Seen in Plays That Suit,” Cleveland Sunday Plain Dealer (24 August 1919): ­Editorial/Dramatic, 4. 21 W. Ward Marsh, “Discussing Strikes, a Film Walkout Would be Awful,” Cleveland Sunday Plain Dealer (12 October 1919): 4. Marsh amassed a large collection of lantern slides used to advertise upcoming films in the city, a collection that the Cleveland Public Library has digitized and made accessible on its website. 22 “The Screen,” Detroit Sunday Free Press (7 January 1917): 4.3. 23 “The Reel Players,” Detroit Free Press (8 January 1917): 6; “The Screen,” Detroit Sunday Free Press (10 March 1918): 4.8–9. 24 “Screen Chat,” Detroit Sunday Free Press (17 November 1918): D8. 25 “‘Well, What Do You Want Me to Talk About?’ Says Douglas,” Detroit Sunday Free Press (8 ­December 1918): B4; “How Motion Pictures Sway Public Opinion,” Detroit Sunday Free Press (15 December 1918): B11; and “Charles Dullin, French Actor, Admires W.S. Hart,” Detroit Sunday Free Press (9 February 1919): C10. 26 “A Cinema Dictionary,” Detroit Sunday Free Press (19 January 1919): C11. The terms included long shot, medium shot, close up, fade in, fade out, chemical fade in, chemical fade out, iris in, double exposure, iris effect, mask, insert, and cutback. 27 Karl K. Kitchen, “Behind the Screen – The True Story of the Movies,” Detroit Sunday Free Press (6 April 1919): C10. 2 8 “The Screen,” Detroit Sunday Free Press (28 September 1919): C14, C16, and C17. James Oliver Curwood, “Suffered Hardships in Artic Regions,” Detroit Sunday Free Press (28 September 1919): C14. However, a trade press listing names Mary Humphrey as editor – “Motion Picture News First Annual Newspaper and Theater Directory,” Motion Picture News (27 December 1919): 159. 29 “Ohio Has Two Sons and One Daughter on Cleveland Screens This Week,” and “Photo Play Gossip and Comment; Film News of Interest to Clevelanders,” Cleveland Sunday Plain Dealer (3 September 1916): News Features/Photo Plays, 4–5; and “Motion Picture Theaters,” Cleveland Plain Dealer (10 September 1917): 6. 30 See the four columns of ads, Cleveland Sunday Plain Dealer (9 June 1918): Editorial/Dramatic, 6. 31 “What’s Doing in Neighborhood Filmland,” Detroit Sunday Free Press (17 November 1918): 4.7, and (24 November 1918): 4.10. The Gratiot also may have been near enough to serve the Lower Poletown neighborhood. 32 Paramount-Artcraft ad, Detroit Sunday Free Press (1 September 1918): B8. See also the Metro ad, Detroit Sunday Free Press (7 January 1917): 4.2; and the Paramount ad, Detroit Free Press (17 February 1916): 6. 33 Opera House ad, Cleveland Plain Dealer (24 January 1918): Editorial/Dramatic, 6. 34 Orpheum ad, Cleveland Sunday Plain Dealer (18 August 1918): Editorial/Dramatic, 4; Cedar ad, Cleveland Sunday Plain Dealer (29 September 1918): Editorial/Dramatic, 6; Jewel ad, Cleveland Sunday Plain Dealer (13 October 1918); Editorial/Dramatic, 2; Norwood and Superior ads, Cleveland Sunday Plain Dealer (9 October 1918): 8; and Union ad, Cleveland Sunday Plain Dealer (1 December 1918): Editorial/Dramatic, 6. 35 Priscilla ad, Cleveland Sunday Plain Dealer (2 June 1918): Editorial/Dramatic, 6; Mall-Alhambra ad, Cleveland Sunday Plain Dealer (16 June 1918): Editorial/Dramatic, 5; Cedar ad, Cleveland Plain Dealer (8 July 1918): 6; Majestic and Home ads, Cleveland Plain Dealer (15 July 1918): 6; Haltnorth ad, ­Cleveland Plain Dealer (12 August 1918): 4; and Crown ad, Cleveland Plain Dealer (28 September 1918): 4.

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Newspapers and silent cinema history 36 Washington ads, Detroit Sunday Free Press (3 February 1918): B7, (10 February 1918): 4.8, (17 ­February 1918): 4.9, and (4 August 1918): 4.7; Colonial ad, Detroit Sunday Free Press (22 September 1918): 4.8; Adams ads, Detroit Sunday Free Press (15 September 1918): 4.8, and (22 September 1918): 4.7; and Crystal ad, Detroit Sunday Free Press (29 September 1918): 4.7. 37 Washington ad, Detroit Sunday Free Press (1 July 1917): C10; Orpheum ad, Detroit Sunday Free Press (31 March 1918): C9; Regent ad, Detroit Sunday Free Press (14 April 1918): 4.7; Ferry Field ad, ­D etroit Sunday Free Press (21 April 1918): 4.9; Drury Lane ad, Detroit Sunday Free Press (5 May 1918): 4.11; and Crystal ad, Detroit Sunday Free Press (2 June 1918): 4.11. 38 Majestic ads, Detroit Sunday Free Press (10 March 1918): 4.9, (31 March 1918): C9, and 7 April 1918): 4.9; Crystal and Courtesy ads, Detroit Sunday Free Press (19 May 1918): 4.11; and Liberty ad, Detroit Sunday Free Press (18 August 1918): 4.9. See also “‘The Unbeliever’, Has All Detroit Talking,” Michigan Film Review (19 March 1918): 6; and “‘The Unbeliever’ Still Holds Record,” Michigan Film Review (18 June 1918): 8. 39 Washington ads, Detroit Sunday Free Press (21 April 1918): 4.9, (28 April 1918): 4.11, (5 May 1918): 4.11, and (12 May 1918): 4.11; Broadway Strand ads, Detroit Sunday Free Press (11 August 1918): 4.7, and (18 August 1918): 4.7; and Washington ads, Detroit Sunday Free Press (29 September 1918): 4.6, and (6 October 1918): 4.6. 40 Washington ads, Detroit Sunday Free Press (23 June 1918): 4.11, and (30 June 1918): 4.7; Detroit Opera House ads, Detroit Sunday Free Press (7 July 1918): 4.8, and (15 September 1918): 4.9. 41 The Fatal Ring ad, Detroit Sunday Free Press (5 August 1917): C2; The 7 Pearls ad (16 ­September 1917): 4.10; and Wolves of Kulture ads, Detroit Sunday Free Press (10 November 1918): 4.7, and (24 November 1918): 4.6. 42 For good examples in 1914–1916, see Kitty Kelly (Chicago Tribune) and “The Film Girl” (Syracuse Herald) – Abel, Menus for Movieland, 196–201, 207–213, 220–222, and 227–237. 43 Harlowe Hoyt, for instance, offers a rare evaluation of Lois Weber’s The Price of a Good Time, with Mildred Harris, and Stella Maris, with Mary Pickford, in Hoyt, “Screen Favorites Appear in Unusual Characters and Acquit Selves Well,” Cleveland Sunday Plain Dealer (20 January 1918): Editorial/Dramatic, 4. 4 4 For an analysis of earlier newspaper contests, see Abel (2015: 130–139). 45 “Can You Name Her?” Cleveland Sunday Plain Dealer (13 January 1918): Editorial/Dramatic, 4; “That Screen Star Puzzle,” Cleveland Sunday Plain Dealer (31 March 1918): Editorial/Dramatic, 5. 46 “Photo Play Contest Seeks Popular Star,” Cleveland Sunday Plain Dealer (31 March 1918): ­Editorial/ Dramatic, 5. 47 “Photo Play Contest Seeks Popular Star,” Cleveland Sunday Plain Dealer (14 April 1918): Editorial/ Dramatic, 6, and (21 April 1918): Editorial/Dramatic, 5. 48 “Daily Cleveland To Be On Screen,” Cleveland Plain Dealer (24 May 1917): 6. Samuel Brodsky directed the newsreel for Argus; V.B. Gray, the paper’s assistant city editor, supervised the production; and Standard Film Exchange initially handled distribution until Argus took over that task. 49 “See Cleveland In Film Shows Today,” Cleveland Sunday Plain Dealer (3 June 1917): A12. 50 Advertisement, Cleveland Sunday Plain Dealer (13 January 1918): Editorial/Dramatic, 6. 51 Another theater was near a second Polish neighborhood along south Broadway, and several others were near a third Polish community in the near southwest. 52 Advertisements, Cleveland Plain Dealer (24 February 1918): Editorial/Dramatic, 6, (24 March 1918): Editorial/Dramatic, 6, and (28 April 1918): Editorial/Dramatic, 6. 53 Robert Izant, “News Weekly Now in Demand, Receives Praise,” Cleveland Plain Dealer (15 June 1917): 6; “Detroit Wants Magazine Like Plain Dealer’s,” Cleveland Plain Dealer (26 July 1917): 6; and Advertisements, Cleveland Plain Dealer (27 January 1918): Editorial/Dramatic, 6, and (21 April 1918): Editorial/Dramatic, 6. 54 Advertisements, Cleveland Sunday Plain Dealer (14 April 1918): Editorial/Dramatic, 6, and (16 June 1918): Editorial/Dramatic, 7; Harlowe R. Hoyt, “Salary Listed as Largest Paid to Screen Player,” Cleveland Plain Dealer (14 November 1918): 10. 55 See the small advertisement, Cleveland Plain Dealer (29 September 1919); 12. See also the tiny ­A rgus ad that mentions only exhibition supplies, Cleveland Plain Dealer (5 June 1919): 14. 56 “Detroit Wants Magazine Like Plain Dealer’s,” Cleveland Plain Dealer (26 July 1917): 6. 57 Advertisements, Detroit Free Press (3 March 1918): C5, (7 March 1918): 6, (10 March 1918): C8, and (14 March 1918): 8. See also the Metropolitan ad, Michigan Film Review (21 May 1918): 14. Ben Strassfeld, a doctoral student at the University of Michigan, led me to these newsreels; he presented a paper on them at the regional Orphans Film Conference, Indiana University, 2013.

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Richard Abel 58 “The Free Press Film Edition Attraction at Washington,” Detroit Free Press (17 March 1918): 12; “Detroit’s Life in Pictures to be Seen on Many Screens,” Detroit Free Press (18 March 1918): 5; “The Free Press Film Edition Shows New Topics This Week,” Detroit Free Press (24 March 1918): 16; “Free Press Film Is Replete With Views of City Events,” Detroit Free Press (8 April 1918): 6; and “Free Press Films Show Big Events,” Detroit Free Press (25 April 1918): 2. 59 Metropolitan ad, Michigan Film Review (21 May 1918): 14; and “Soldiers Moving to East Seen in Free Press Film,” Detroit Free Press (9 June 1918): 8. See also the “Detroit Free Press Film Edition” ad, Detroit Free Press (16 June 1918): C8. 6 0 “Big Film Weeklies Merge with Free Press Edition,” Detroit Free Press (17 November 1918): 8; and “Gen. Pershing’s Visit Shown in Free Press Film Edition,” Detroit Free Press (23 December 1918): 22. 61 Advertisements, Detroit Free Press (14 March 1918): 8, and (21 March 1918): 8; “The Free Press Film Edition Attraction at Washington,” Detroit Free Press (17 March 1918): 12; “Liberty Loan is Featured in Free Press Film Edition,” Detroit Free Press (7 April 1918): 8; and “Patriotic Events Dominate New Free Press Film Edition,” Detroit Free Press (15 April 1918): 3. 62 Advertisements, Detroit Free Press (14 March 1918): 8, (21 March 1918): 8, and (9 June 1918): C8; “The Free Press Film Edition Shows New Topics This Week,” Detroit Free Press (24 March 1918): 16; “Tigers-Indians Game Seen in Free Press Film Edition,” Detroit Free Press (21 April 1918): 18; and “Free Press Photographer Snaps People and Happenings,” Detroit Free Press (19 May 1918): 18. 63 Advertisements, Detroit Free Press (2 June 1918): C8, (16 June 1918): C8, (13 July 1918): 5, (19 July 1918): 5, and (11 August 1918): C6. 64 See, for instance, the Madison program in John Kunsky’s house organ, Weekly Film Review 4.25 (23 June 1918): 2. The “Madison Topical Review” compiled “Detroit and Michigan” events photographed by the Ford Motor Co. [and] “World-wide events from Pathé photographers everywhere.” 65 “Free Press Films Show Big Events,” Detroit Free Press (25 April 1918): 2.

References Abel, R. (1999) The Red Rooster Scare: Making Cinema American, 1900–1910. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Abel, R. (2006) Americanizing the Movies and “Movie-Mad” Audiences, 1910–1914. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Abel, R. (2015) Menus for Movieland: Newspapers and the Emergence of American Film Culture, 1913–1916. Oakland, CA: University of California Press. Boles, F. (2010) “Michigan Newspapers: A Two Hundred Year Review.” Michigan Historical Review 36(1): 31–69. Boutros, A. and Straw, W. (2010) “Introduction.” in A. Boutros and W. Straw (eds.) Circulation and the City: Essays on Urban Culture. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press (pp. 3–36). Brophy, A. (2003) “‘The Committee ... has stood out against coercion’: The Reinvention of Detroit Americanization, 1915–1931.” Michigan Historical Review 29(2): 1–29. Conot, R. (1974) American Odyssey. New York, NY: William Morrow. Hooker, C. (1997) Life in the Shadows of the Crystal Palace, 1910–1917: Ford Workers in the Model T Era. Bowling Green, KY: Bowling Green University Press. Kaplan, R. (2002) Politics and the American Press: The Rise of Objectivity, 1865–1920. Cambridge: ­Cambridge University Press. Kowalski, G. (2002) Hamtramck: The Driven City. Chicago, IL: Arcadia. Serafino, F. (1983) West of Warsaw. Hamtramck, MI: Hamtramck Avenue Publishing. Shaw, A.H. (1942) The Plain Dealer, One Hundred Years in Cleveland. New York, NY: Knopf. Van Tassel, D. and Grabowski, J. (eds.) (1996) The Encyclopedia of Cleveland History Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Zunz, O. (1982) The Changing Face of Inequality: Urbanization, Industrial Development, and Immigration in Detroit, 1880–1920. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

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7 Arclights and zoom lenses Searching for influential exhibitors in film history’s big data Eric Hoyt

Metaphors matter. The search and data mining platforms I helped develop, Lantern and ­Arclight, take their names from light sources. The names derive from historic film technologies, and they also riff on Apache Solr, the open-source search index that powers both platforms. However, the names of Lantern and Arclight are first and foremost meant to evoke the idea of shining light on something we previously had difficulty seeing. There is no doubt that these platforms – and the nearly two-million-page collection of the Media History Digital Library (MHDL) that they search – have illuminated sources that film historians had previously neglected and enabled a new scale for running research queries. However, I increasingly think about the other side of the light metaphor – the shadows that rapid search power and a sense of digital abundance may cast on other sources. The MHDL, for example, has two especially deep shadows. Due to intellectual property constraints, books and periodicals that were published after 1964 and/or outside of the United States are underrepresented in the collection. Several historians of literature and media have also used the metaphor of zooming to describe the process of applying digital tools to text analysis. The zoom metaphor succeeds in describing the process of toggling between forms of close and distant reading. Yet, as cinema scholars may grasp better than our peers in other fields, a zoom lens does not simply move our view further or closer. Zooming changes the lens’ focal length, and in doing so, transforms our vision (think of the shallow depth of field and flattened space of a telephoto setting or the warped edges and elongated space of a wide angle). These transformations and distortions are, in fact, one of the best aspects of digital humanities research methods. In my work topic modeling movie magazines and visualizing screenplays, I found that I came away with a new understanding of a text or group of texts when I compared how I read them to how a computer reads them (Hoyt, 2014; Hoyt, Ponto, and Roy, 2014). Machine reading and distant reading in these instances were never substitutes for reading at least some of the underlying texts closely. The purpose of this chapter is to present some of the opportunities of digital humanities research methods in a way that remains attuned to the different sides of light and zoom lenses – the illumination of some sources but not others, the toggling between scales that not only provides new views but also transforms and warps our vision. The chapter is structured in three sections. The first describes the Arclight software (http://search.projectarclight.org) and explains how it was designed to allow researchers to investigate questions and, in the process, 83

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to facilitate zoom-like toggling between close and distant reading. The computer, however, still cannot do the interpretive work of constructing a historical argument. For these reasons, it is important that researchers have a basic understanding of the technical side of search and visualization technologies and possess a framework for interpreting the results. The second section proposes that the interpretive framework of scaled entity search (SES) should accompany research utilizing Arclight. The third and final section offers an example of Arclight and SES being applied at scale toward a new cinema history question: which American exhibitors were especially prominent, visible, and influential within the industry between 1915 and 1930? The results point toward the existence of a star system within the ranks of exhibitors.

Investigating questions with Arclight It’s Twitter analytics for film and media history. This was the elevator pitch that Charles Acland and I, along with our teams at the Concordia University and the University of Wisconsin-Madison, developed for Project Arclight. We had watched as, over the previous few years, commercial media companies embraced computational analytics to identify actors and TV shows that were “trending” on Twitter. Beyond measuring popularity, these firms offered granular and often surprising analyses of regional tastes, social networks, and discourse. We believed a similar methodology of analyzing discussions of media content across digitized collections could make an important contribution to film and media history. Project Arclight represented an opportunity to put film and media studies into greater dialogue with the digital humanities and methods of big data analytics (Hoyt, Hughes, and Acland, 2016). We also saw Project Arclight as aligning with the innovative research programs of media industry studies, useful cinema, and the new cinema history – all of which decenter the film or broadcasting text as the main object of study in favor of looking at the institutional, social, cultural, and industrial structures that shape media production, circulation, and reception. There was, of course, one inherent problem with our snappy elevator pitch: Twitter was only launched in 2006. The twentieth-century audiences, exhibitors, and industry figures we wanted to study did not tweet or blog their thoughts to the world. They did, however, read and occasionally contribute to magazines and trade papers. Because the MHDL had digitized dozens of different periodicals that commented on the same people and things, we could treat these magazines and trade papers as our corpus and big data. And because we had worked on expanding the collections of the MHDL and building its search platform, Lantern, we understood what the collection comprised and how the data were structured. When we received a Digging into Data grant in 2014 sponsored by the Institute for Museum and Library Services in the United States and Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council in Canada, the funding enabled us to put our ideas into practice. We embarked on experiments, organized a symposium, and started developing software to share our methods with a wide range of researchers. In developing the Arclight software, we sought to build a web-based application that film and media researchers – most of whom have zero experience programming computers – would find easy and fast to use. Whereas early prototypes of Arclight required working from the command line and downloading software, the version we publicly launched in October 2015 functions within the user’s web browser and features a graphical user interface (GUI). This version of the Arclight software is freely available at http://search.projectarclight.org. If you go to this site, you can enter terms, names, and phrases into the text box and quickly graph how they trend over time across the publications digitized by the MHDL (Figure 7.1). 84

Arclights and zoom lenses 700 600 500 400 300 200 100 0 1910

1915 Marcus Loew

1920 B.S.Moss

Sydney S.Cohen

1925

1930

Fred Meyer

Figure 7.1  A  rclight graph comparing the number of MHDL pages featuring the names of four ­exhibitors – Marcus Loew, B.S. Moss, Sydney S. Cohen, and Fred Meyer – over the period of 1910–1930

The empty query box that greets users upon visiting the app’s homepage was included for a reason. We wanted users to be able to apply Arclight to their own interests and questions. Researchers can use Arclight to explore any topic they might put within a search box on Lantern or ProQuest. Arclight can also process the same Boolean operators (e.g. OR, AND) as other search platforms. As we have detailed elsewhere, the algorithmic backbone of Arclight is a hack of the open-source search technology, Apache Solr (Hoyt et al., 2014). What makes Arclight different from conventional search platforms is that it enables the searching of dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of such terms and expressions simultaneously. This allows us to ask different types of research questions. Rather than asking, “Who was Thomas Watson?,” we can ask, “How did Thomas Watson compare to other ­exhibitors in his appearances in the trade press, and what exhibitors of similarly modest statute within the industry managed to achieve a significant amount of visibility and recognition within the industry?” The “who was Thomas Watson?” question might lead to a publication, like the excellent one published by David Resha (2012), that uses Watson as a case study to think about the challenges facing small exhibitors in the late 1910s and 1920s. The latter question would build on this case study by allowing us to look at how exhibitors might have used the trade press to position themselves within this competitive industry environment. It is worth pausing here to consider the way we formulate, ask, and investigate research questions. I have heard a number of film scholars express concerns that the digital humanities allows the tail to wag the dog. In other words, rather than leveraging digital methods toward pursuing the questions that interest us most, researchers adapt our research interests to fit the available datasets and technologies. My own impression is that the process of asking and investigating research questions in the humanities has always tended to be more dialectical than 85

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unidirectional. Smart film and broadcasting historians take advantage of the archives in close proximity and take these into account in formulating research questions. As a result, the faculty and students at my institution, University of Wisconsin-Madison, have generated hundreds of books, articles, dissertations, and papers researching questions related to United Artists, NBC, Watson, and the many other collections housed at the Wisconsin Center for Film Theater Research and Wisconsin Historical Society. The best of these projects triangulate what they find in the nearby archive with other archives and sources. They also remain attentive to perspectives and experiences that were not saved. Research using digital methods, including Arclight, can operate quite similarly to this earlier paradigm of formulating and investigating questions. Some types of questions and projects are better suited to Arclight than others (as noted earlier, researchers investigating film history post-1964 will likely come up short). And, even when a research topic falls firmly within the strengths of the MHDL’s ­collection – American cinema’s transition to sound, for example – scholars should not stop their searching in the pages of trade papers and fan magazines. Newspapers, archival manuscripts, and the work of contemporary historians all fall within the shadows of Lantern and Arclight. After entering the search terms and clicking the magnifying glass icon, Arclight generates a line graph displaying the number of pages per year in the MHDL that contain the search term. The X-axis represents time; the Y-axis tracks the number of matching pages. The a­ lgorithm works on a simple binary basis: if the term appears at least once on a page, then it counts as a one; if the term does not appear, then it registers as a zero. The algorithm then adds up all the ones and zeroes to generate the per year totals. If a term appears multiple times on the same page, it still only counts as a one. We chose to program the application this way for two r­ easons: it helps mitigate against imperfect optical character recognition (OCR) that might incorrectly recognize the characters of a name at the top of a page but correctly recognize them midway down, and it makes the process more transparent and easier to understand than if we had used some smoothing logarithm that weighted some page matches more than others. Even more important for making Arclight transparent was the decision to allow users to scratch beneath the surface of a graph and explore the underlying matching pages themselves. We wanted to avoid the limitations of Google Ngram Viewer, which allows users to graph how terms trend across the Google Books corpus but prevents them from accessing those books and discovering the reasons for those trend lines. We programmed Arclight so that users can click on any dot in the graph and immediately open up a list of matching pages for that year within Lantern. Once inside Lantern, users can scroll through the list of matching pages and get a quick sense for the types of publications and relevant snippets of texts. When a user wants to explore a particular publication more closely, they can click on the “Read in Context” option and open up the magazine to the approximate page of the matching snippet of text. These features allow the user to toggle from distant reading, to a sort of mid-level reading, to the close reading of going page-by-page inside a digitized magazine. No view is complete, and each one allows us to see something different: the graph can suggest a trend or pattern, the list of snippets and page hits can tell us if there is something generalizable, and the close reading of the magazine enables us to see how a particular instance functions in the context of a historical document. To provide more lenses for distant reading, we implemented three additional graphing options and a magazine filtering option – all of which are documented in depth on the Project Arclight website (Tran, 2015). Additionally, one of the app’s most powerful tools is not a visualization at all. Arclight allows users to download the results of searches as a CSV file (comma-separated value), which can be opened, edited, and analyzed using Excel. When searching for hundreds of names, the line graphs become cluttered and the CSVs are essential for digging into the data. But spreadsheets of data cannot get you very far without methods for interpretation. 86

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Scaled entity search and methods for interpretation The most important breakthrough in developing Arclight came not through writing any line of code or perfecting any visualization; instead, it came from understanding that the most important part of the process was something that could not be encoded into the software: human interpretation. Many business-oriented users of big data have also come to the same conclusion: the software and size of the data are less important than the insights one can actually glean from the process (Leetaru, 2016). What does it take to interpret the quantitative results of searching for 2,000 radio stations or 350 exhibitor names? Some basic literacy in statistics – averages, medians, standard deviations, samples, populations – is helpful. What is even more important, though, is understanding the key components that go into a search. SES, the method my team and I developed (Hoyt et al., 2014), encourages researchers to reflect on the following three elements: •

•

•

The Entities – How and why did you select this grouping to compare? If you did not generate the entity list yourself, where did it come from? What sources were used to generate the data? How does this list open up new possibilities for research? How does it limit or close down other possibilities? The Corpus – What is the size and scope of the corpus being queried? Who created it and why? What are its strengths and weaknesses in terms of the time periods covered and diversity of publications? The Digital – What digital technologies, algorithms, and data structures influence the process and results? What is the quality of the OCR, and how does making materials machine readable change the research process? What schema, fields, and facets were used in creating the search index? What historical materials, processes, and experiences do not easily lend themselves to digitization and what effect does their omission have on results?

All three of these elements – the entities, the corpus, and the digital – need to be thought about in relation to one another, not in isolation. The most important of these relationships is between the entities and the corpus. As some of my students have learned the hard way, running searches of the names of 1980s television stars in the largely pre-1964 corpus of the MHDL will likely lead to frustration, not valuable results. Then again, interesting things can sometimes happen when you search for a slightly mismatched entity list (1920s baseball players or German film titles, for example) in the US ­entertainment-focused collection of the MHDL. This sort of disjunctive querying can reveal crossover figures, some of which we might expect (e.g. Babe Ruth and Caligari), but others that surprise us (Detroit Tigers outfielder Harry Heilman attracted the attention of media industry magazines in the late 1930s and 1940s because of his transition from athlete to radio announcer). SES encourages researchers to understand the digital search process and think about the relationship of this process to the entities and corpus. However, applications of SES do not need to end with these meta-level reflections. Scholars need to be able to formulate and investigate their own research questions. Critical reflections on the process are important, but our digital tools should not hijack our research agendas and always become the objects of study. The next section attempts to model how the Arclight software and SES process can be used to explore the history of US film exhibition. 87

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Searching for influential exhibitors Which American exhibitors were especially prominent and influential within the film ­industry’s trade press over the period between 1915 and 1930 and why? The answer(s) to this question are relevant to the histories of cinema and American culture. As Richard Maltby (2013: 141) has pointed out, “while the social history of cinema cannot be understood without engaging with the microhistories of individual venues, these local histories were themselves embedded in larger, national processes of circulation.” The film industry’s trade papers provided a vital connective tissue for these processes of circulation, as well as for the formation of communities and factions among US exhibitors. If we can identify ­especially prominent and influential exhibitors, then it can lead us not only toward explorations of their careers but also toward better understandings of their communities and how the different trade papers varied from each other. As I detail in my forthcoming about the history of Hollywood’s trade press, the movie ­industry had more trade papers devoted to it than most other US ­industries. The fierce competition contributed to moments in which trade papers attacked one another for being in the pockets of the major studios and failing to represent the interests of independent exhibitors. If the SES analysis were to reveal that some exhibitor names only appeared in the Chicago-based Exhibitor’s Herald and not the New York-based Motion Picture News, then this would support the Herald’s claims that it better represented American exhibitors outside of the nation’s largest city. If, on the other hand, the same exhibitors are discussed more or less equally across four weekly exhibitor trade papers the MHDL has digitized from the 1920s – Motion Picture News, Moving Picture World, Exhibitors Trade Review, and Exhibitors Herald – then this would suggest the differences are more about rhetorical positioning than news reporting. Before I could search for influential exhibitors, I needed to generate an entity list of exhibitors to pipe into Arclight. But where to find them? I began by consulting the sources that the film industry used in the 1920s to structure its data: yearbooks, issued annually by the leading trade paper publishers. I selected a yearbook that was published roughly at the midpoint of the period from 1915 to 1930 that interested me. Film Year Book 1922–1923 does not contain a census of all American exhibitors (and no such census was ever undertaken in the 1910s or 1920s, as far as I know). However, Film Year Book, which would soon become known as Film Daily Year Book, does include lists of the members and leaders of certain exhibitor trade organizations. I used two of these lists and supplemented them with a third and quite different list from Exhibitors Herald. Rather than merging all of the lists together, I found they were more meaningful and telling when examined in the context of their exhibitor communities.

List 1: New York Theater Owners Chamber of Commerce In printing the membership list of New York’s most important exhibitor trade organization, the Film Year Book (Dannenberg, 1923: 247) offered the following introduction: While the following members of the Theatre Owners’ Chamber of Commerce number one hundred and twenty-five, the number of houses represented by these members in Greater New York and vicinity exceeds SIX HUNDRED THEATRES. Some of these members control from five to seventy theatres. In fact, the Film Year Book editors had gotten the math wrong: the list included 204 names, not 125. But the editors succeeded in communicating the essence of this organization – a 88

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modestly sized group of American exhibitors based in New York City who exerted an outsized influence and control over the nation’s some 16,000 theaters. An even smaller number of the exhibitors in this group were especially influential. Which of the New York theater owners received the most attention in the trade press ­between 1915 and 1930? My fellow Project Arclight researcher Tony Tran and I plugged these names into the Arclight app, filtering for year span and journal titles and downloading the results as CSV files that we could open and edit in Excel. We ran the names as ­Boolean strings, such as “Lee Ochs” OR “Lee A. Ochs” OR “Ochs, Lee” OR “Ochs, Lee A.” OR “L.A. Ochs” OR “Ochs, L.A.” After compiling the results and weeding out two false positives (exhibitors who happened to have the same name as actors), we ranked the theater owners based on the number of MHDL pages between 1915 and 1930 that discuss them. Here are the ten most frequently mentioned theater owners: 1 Marcus Loew (5754 pages) 2 B.S. Moss (2972 pages) 3 Sydney S. Cohen (2302 pages) 4 Lee A. Ochs (860 page) 5 Max Spiegel (561 pages) 6 A.H. Schwartz (302 pages) 7 Walter Hays (294 pages) 8 John Manheimer (280 pages) 9 Joseph Stern (251 pages) 10 Harry Brandt (241 pages) Now that we know the who, the important question becomes why. Why did these ten exhibitors receive more press attention than the 194 others on the list? Here, we need to move from Arclight’s distant reading into the mid-level and close reading afforded by Lantern. From running Lantern searches on these names, browsing through the results, and reading individual articles, I found that these ten theater owners received an exceptional amount of attention for one of three reasons. One reason for prominence within the trade press was productivity in building and acquiring theaters. Max Spiegel, A.H. Schwartz, Walter Hays, and Joseph Stern all appeared frequently in the trade papers because of their building and expansion activities and because they took steps to publicize those activities. The trade papers did not employ beat reporters; instead, they encouraged the news to come to them. They appointed exhibitors as correspondents and invited theater owners to write in about their activities, some of which they chose to publish. A second reason for prominence was leadership within the industry’s trade organizations. Sydney S. Cohen was the founder and first president of the Motion Picture Theater Owners of America (MPTOA, discussed more below). Brooklyn exhibitor John Manheimer was chairman of the New York Owners’ Chamber of Commerce (NYOCC) and served on the MPTOA’s executive committee. Lee A. Ochs was the president of Motion Picture Exhibitor League of America, an organization that preceded and, in many ways, precipitated the formation of the MPTOA. A close reading of the articles discussing Ochs is a reminder that trade press prominence does not necessarily equate to positive attention. The tone of the coverage was very divided – Exhibitors Trade Review, which Ochs co-founded in late 1916, supported him, whereas Motion Picture News and Exhibitors Herald regarded him as a corrupt scoundrel. Although some data mining research and software employed for distant reading incorporates “sentiment analysis,” Arclight does not; researchers need to look at the 89

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underlying articles to get a sense for the tenor of the discourse (Bae and Lee, 2012). But, as I have stressed, this zooming between macro and micro views is a key part of the process of research and discovery. A third reason for prominence – and, to me, the most interesting – was that a select few American exhibitors became brand names. Producers and distributors sought to associate their films with these quality brands. Marcus Loew and B.S. Moss appeared in so many pages of the trade papers because their names were summoned in hundreds of advertisements attempting to persuade American exhibitors to book Universal, United Artists, or Pathé pictures. “The World’s Greatest Exhibitor Marcus Loew saw it – then booked it solid for his New York and Brooklyn Theatres,” promised an advertisement from First National for a curiously untitled picture (Exhibitors Herald and Motography, 1919: 4). Meanwhile, Film Guild Productions assured exhibitors that its four Glenn Hunter pictures “played to crowded houses at the B.S. Moss Cameo Theatre on Broadway for two weeks” (Moving Picture World, 1923: 522). Loew and Moss, like other exhibitors on the list, also received coverage for buying and building theaters (Loew additionally received extensive coverage in Variety for his important role in the vaudeville industry). But they appeared even more frequently in ads taken out by film companies, including a 1927 two-page promotion for Pathé that featured a street map of Broadway theaters (Figure 7.2). Three of the eleven prominent Broadway theaters featured in the advertisement were attributed to B.S. Moss. Arclight and SES provide some answers about exhibitor prominence from 1915 to 1930, but they open up new research questions too. What were the negotiations between distributors and brand name exhibitors that enabled these advertisements with their direct and indirect endorsements? How did Benjamin S. Moss come to occupy such a high stature within the 1920s film industry? Whereas film historians have researched and analyzed the careers

Figure 7.2  P  athé advertisement featuring a map of prominent Broadway theaters (Motion Picture News, 1927: 1472)

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of Marcus Loew and Samuel “Roxy” Rothafel (who was not a member of the NYOCC but also appeared in hundreds of film advertisements), Moss appears in very little film scholarship (Melnick, 2012). Beyond owning some of the most important Broadway theaters, were there reasons that his name mattered to film distributors and exhibitors?

List 2: MPTOA, Board of Directors, and Executive Committees Rather than embarking on a B.S. Moss biography, I wanted to apply Arclight to a more regionally diverse list of names than the NYOCC. I chose the leaders of the trade group that butted heads in the early 1920s with the NYOCC: the MPTOA. In 1920, Sydney S. Cohen led the formation of the MPTOA in an effort to merge the two national exhibitor organizations and mount a defense against Adolph Zukor’s expansion from production and distribution into exhibition (Overpeck, 2007: 99). In 1923, the regionally diverse leadership of the MPTOA consisted of eight officers, fourteen directors, and thirty-three members of the executive committee. These fifty-seven names, published in Film Year Book 1922–1923, became the starting point for another round of SES (Dannenberg, 1923: 267). Searching for the names of MPTOA leaders proved to be a rather unsatisfying and circular exercise. The trade papers and yearbooks reported on these exhibitors primarily because they were active within the MPTOA or similar trade organizations. Appropriately, the most frequently mentioned exhibitor on this list was Sydney S. Cohen, the MPTOA’s founding president. While all five of the trade papers that I searched discussed Cohen more than any other exhibitor on the list, the trade papers varied in the amount of attention they gave to other MPTOA leaders. The differences largely broke down along regional lines: New Jersey exhibitor R.F. Woodhull received a significant amount of attention in the New York City-based Moving Picture World and Motion Picture News, whereas W.D. Burford of Aurora, Illinois, was the second most frequently discussed person on the list in the Chicago-based Exhibitors Herald. The most valuable outcome of applying Arclight to this list was getting a comparative perspective on which people on the list, in addition to Cohen, were especially prominent within the industry and particular trade papers. Ultimately, though, the MPTOA search experiment wound up confirming things we already knew and expected. The experiment taken in isolation would seem to confirm the critiques that distant reading fails to tell us something truly new. But if we are being honest, are disappointments not part of archival research too? Instead of taking these moments as evidence of a failed method, we should take them as a sign to keep searching.

List 3: the “Herald Only” Club To compile a third list of exhibitors, I closed the 1922–1923 Film Year Book and opened a 1923 issue of Exhibitors Herald. My list became the membership roster of the “Herald Only” Club. I hoped that applying this list to Arclight would offer insight into a different demographic of American exhibitor and trade paper reader. What was the “Herald Only” Club? The idea initially emerged from Ohio exhibitor George Rea, who complained in May 1923 that exhibitors were reporting on movies in a variety of trade papers instead of exclusively in Exhibitors Herald. Rea (1923: 69) emphatically declared, I, for one, am going to report my pictures exclusively to the Herald’s “What the Picture Did for Me” department and nowhere else. Let’s keep our reports where we know they’ll be taken care of by a paper that knows how and isn’t afraid. 91

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Exhibitors Herald editor Martin Quigley coined the term “‘Herald Only’ Club” and, week by week, tracked the movement’s growth. Although the idea had originally formulated around exclusively writing to Exhibitors Herald, the club was soon framed about being equally as much about exclusively reading the Herald. “It is the only paper I take now and I find it covers everything,” wrote a small-town Oklahoma exhibitor in one of many such testimonials published in regard to the “Herald Only” Club (C.M Hartman cited in Exhibitors Herald, 1924: 63). Alongside such testimonials, the growing roster of “Herald Only” Club members was frequently published. The 8 December 1923 issue of Exhibitors Herald listed seventy-seven Club members. They came from thirty different states, and three managed theaters in Canada (Exhibitors Herald, 1923a: 62). It is worth noting, however, that almost exactly half the members (thirty-eight of seventy-seven) managed theaters in one of the six Midwestern states: Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Michigan, Nebraska, and Ohio (Exhibitors Herald, 1923b: 63). Four “Herald Only” members came from the state of New York, but their theaters were all located in small towns more than a hundred miles away from the island of Manhattan. They were geographically removed from the 204 members of the NYOCC, but they also belonged to a different industry class. In her book chapter, “‘What the Picture Did for Me’: Small-Town Exhibitors and the Great Depression,” film historian Kathryn Fuller-Seeley (2008: 186) argues that “the overwhelming majority of the column’s contributors were independent theater owners who operated 200- to 500-seat houses in towns of 5,000 or fewer people. Most of these smalltown exhibitors were in the Midwest, Plains, and Mountain states.” An examination of the “Herald Only” Club list reveals that the demographic trends that Fuller-Seeley identifies for 1930s “What the Picture Did for Me” contributors also holds true for 1920s. In running SES on the “Herald Only” Club, I assumed that most of these exhibitors would pop up infrequently, but I hoped there might be some outliers. I was especially interested in two questions. First, which small-town exhibitors were able to achieve an outsized influence and visibility in the trade press? And second, did these exhibitors actually stay true to their “Herald Only” vows, or did some of them cheat and contribute to other publications as well? I found compelling instances of both. Philip Rand was the owner of the Rex Theater in Salmon, Idaho, a rural town with a population of 1,311 in 1920. Rand was also an obsessive reviewer of films. His name appeared on 531 pages of Exhibitors Herald scanned by the MHDL, nearly 70 percent more than the next most prolific “Herald Only” Club member. True to his word, Rand confined his reviews to the Herald’s “What the Picture Did for Me” section and did not publish in the competing trade papers. In late 1923, Rand’s writing earned him a trip to Los Angeles, which he reported on in the Christmas issue of Exhibitors Herald. When Rand visited the Metro set, he had his photo taken with actress Viola Dana, who appeared dressed as a nun as Rand smiled ear to ear and held an issue of Exhibitors Herald. Rand (1923: 62) began the article by gently mocking both himself and “Follywood,” but he concluded it on an earnest note: To say that I am surprised is to put it mildly. I am overwhelmed with the high moral tone of the people, their unfailing kindness and the seriousness of their work. I will venture an opinion that no other industry in America has as fine a lot of men and women as the picture industry at Hollywood. The box office revenue that Rand’s rural theater generated for the Hollywood studios was insignificant to their bottom lines. Rand’s writing, however, was meaningful to thousands of exhibitors who read Exhibitors Herald and rented films. A Hollywood publicist seems to have recognized this and arranged a tour for him accordingly. 92

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To the left of Philip Rand in the October 1923 “‘Herald Only’ Club Album” (Figure 7.3) was Fred S. Meyer of the Palace Theater in Hamilton, Ohio. Meyer was a frequent “What the Picture Did for Me” contributor that year, but he was an atypical contributor in two respects. First, he managed a theater in a city of 40,000 people, considerably larger than the small towns of most of the section’s contributors. Second, he did not write for the Herald only. Meyer contributed reports to Motion Picture News before, during, and after the Herald published his portrait. He appears to have been successful at using the trade press as a means of gaining visibility within the industry and advancing his career. Meyer eventually left Ohio to work for Universal Pictures, assume leadership positions in the MPTOA, and manage a 1,900-seat first-run theater in Milwaukee.

Figure 7.3  T  he portraits of four members of the “Herald Only” Club, including Fred S. Meyer (­bottom left) and Philip Rand (bottom right; Exhibitors Herald, 6 October, 1923, p. 73)

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Conclusion The small-town theater manager whose audience of readers vastly outnumbers the seats in his theater; the ambitious showman who constantly seeks the spotlight to gain legitimacy and move ahead in the industry. These are career trajectories that we can certainly imagine. But we cannot go looking for them by typing a few keywords into a traditional search box. SES and the Arclight software give us a means of investigating these topics, of casting a wide net with lots and lots of names and seeing who comes back. In addition to looking for outliers, we can also use these methods to look for exhibitors who were more typical and representative in the amount of trade press attention they commanded. This too can lead us to interesting places: the median in the “Herald Only” Club SES results is Mrs. C.C. Alguire of Coloma, Michigan, whose gender makes her atypical of her peers. Much remains in the shadows with this method of computational analysis. Graphs, lists, and spread sheets do not tell us about some of the most important aspects and changes in the film industry from 1915 to 1930, especially the contested relationships between the major distributors and independent exhibitors. But Arclight and SES do offer a means of seeing ­exhibitors that we might otherwise miss and providing a field sketch, if not a detailed account, of exhibitor communities. Beyond pointing toward the significance of exhibitor trade organizations, the analysis suggests that exhibitor communities very much had their own star systems, ones that ran in parallel to the constellations of actors they projected on their screens. B.S. Moss and Philip Rand were both stars to their respective audiences. Digital methods can help us spot possible trends and patterns. Further investigation and human interpretation allow us to test potential patterns and say what they mean.

Acknowledgements I would like to thank my fellow researchers on Project Arclight and our sponsors – the Institute of Museum and Library Services, Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, Concordia University, and the University of Wisconsin-Madison – for making this work possible. I am especially grateful to Tony Tran for his assistance in the research and production of this chapter. I would also like to thank David Pierce, the Library of Congress Packard Camus, and our many additional collaborators who worked on building the collections of the Media History Digital Library – without which there would be no Project Arclight.

References Bae, Y. and Lee, H. (2012) “Sentiment Analysis of Twitter Audiences: Measuring the Positive or Negative Influence of Popular Twitterers.” Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology 63(12): 2521–2535. Dannenberg, J. (ed.) (1923) Film Year Book 1922–1923. New York, NY: Wid’s Films and Film Folks, Inc. Retrieved from http://lantern.mediahist.org/catalog/filmyearb1922192223newy_0263 [­Accessed 21 May 2016]. Exhibitors Herald (1923a) “Herald Only’ Club Roster.” 8 December, p. 62. Retrieved from http://­lantern. mediahist.org/catalog/exhibitorsherald17exhi_1163 [Accessed 22 May 2016]. Exhibitors Herald (1923b) “Nebraska Leads in Club Roll Call; Ohio Second.” 8 December, p. 63. ­Retrieved from http://lantern.mediahist.org/catalog/exhibitorsherald17exhi_1163 [Accessed 22 May 2016]. Exhibitors Herald (1924) “‘Herald Only’ Club Gains Six; Veteran and Newcomer Give Reasons for Joining.” 29 March, p. 63. Retrieved from http://lantern.mediahist.org/catalog/­ exhibitorsherald18exhi_0_0073 [Accessed 22 May 2016].

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Arclights and zoom lenses Exhibitors Herald and Motography (1919) “First National Pictures Advertisement.” 26 April, p. 4. ­Retrieved from http://lantern.mediahist.org/catalog/exhibitorsherald08exhi_0304 [Accessed 21 May 2016]. Fuller-Seeley, K. (2008) “‘What the Picture Did for Me’: Small-Town Exhibitors and the Great ­Depression.” In K. Fuller-Seeley (ed.) Hollywood in the Neighborhood: Historical Case Studies of Local Moviegoing. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press (pp. 186–207). Hoyt, E. (2014) “Lenses for Lantern: Data Mining, Visualization, and Excavating Film History’s ­Neglected Sources.” Film History 26(2): 146–168. Hoyt, E. (2019) Motion Papers: The Triumph of American Cinema’s Trade Press. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press. Hoyt, E., Hughes, K., and Acland, C. (2016) “A Guide to the Arclight Guidebook.” In E. Hoyt and C. Acland (eds.) The Arclight Guidebook to Media History and the Digital Humanities. Falmer: REFRAME/ Project Arclight (pp. 11–39). Hoyt, E., Hughes, K., Long, D., Tran, A., and Ponto, K. (2014) “Scaled Entity Search: A Method for Media Historiography and Responses to Critiques of Big Humanities Data Research.” 2014 IEEE International Conference on Big Data, 27–30 October 2014, Washington, pp. 51–59. Retrieved from http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/articleDetails.jsp?reload=true&arnumber=7004453 [Accessed 22 May 2016]. Hoyt, E., Ponto, K., and Roy, C. (2014) “Visualizing and Analyzing the Hollywood Screenplay with ScripThreads.” Digital Humanities Quarterly 8(4). [online] Retrieved from www.digitalhumanities. org/dhq/vol/8/4/000190/000190.html [Accessed 21 May 2016]. Leetaru, K. (2016) “Data Is Not the Same as Truth: Interpretation in the Big Data Era.” Forbes 4 January. Retrieved from www.forbes.com/sites/kalevleetaru/2016/01/04/data-is-not-the-same-as-truthinterpretation-in-the-big-data-era/#7525d79a4ffa [Accessed 21 May 2016]. Maltby, R. (2013) “The Standard Exhibition Contract and the Unwritten History of the Classical Hollywood Cinema.” Film History 25(1–2): 138–153. Melnick, R. (2012) American Showman: Samuel “Roxy” Rothafel and the Birth of the Entertainment Industry, 1908–1935. New York, NY: Columbia University Press. Motion Picture News (1927) “Pathe Advertisement.” 11 November, p. 1472. Retrieved from http://lantern. mediahist.org/catalog/motionp36moti_0454 [Accessed 22 May 2016]. Moving Picture World (1923) “Film Guild Productions Advertisement.” 8 December, p. 522. Retrieved from http://lantern.mediahist.org/catalog/movpicwor65movi_0408 [Accessed 22 May 2016]. Overpeck, D. (2007) Out of the Dark: American Film Exhibition, Political Action and Industrial Change, 1966–1986. Los Angeles, CA: Ph.D. University of California Los Angeles. Rand, P. (1923) “In ‘Follywood’ with Philip Rand.” Exhibitors Herald 29 December, p. 62. Retrieved from http://lantern.mediahist.org/catalog/exhibitorsherald18exhi_0091 [Accessed 22 May 2016]. Rea, G. (1923) “George Rea Letter to Exhibitors Herald.” Exhibitors Herald 26 May, p. 69. Retrieved from http://lantern.mediahist.org/catalog/exhibitorsherald16exhi_0_0869 [Accessed 22 May 2016]. Resha, D. (2012) “Strategies for Survival: The Little Exhibitor in the 1920s.” Quarterly Review of Film and Video 29(1): 12–23. Tran, T. (2015) “The Arclight Guide: Getting Started.” Project Arclight Blog 12 October. Retrieved from http://projectarclight.org/news/the-arclight-guide-getting-started/ [Accessed 23 May 2016].

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8 Comparing historical cinema cultures Reflections on new cinema history and comparison with a cross-national case study on Antwerp and Rotterdam Daniel Biltereyst, Thunnis van Oort, and Philippe Meers Unlike other disciplines within the humanities and the social sciences, it is safe to argue that comparative research is only weakly developed within film and cinema studies. Research on film style, ideology, authorship, stardom, genres, and other perspectives within a humanities-oriented film studies often implicitly emphasizes the complexity, unicity, and idiosyncrasy of films and of their particular genres, authors, stars, and meanings. Within this approach, which Robert C. Allen and Douglas Gomery (1985) provocatively labeled the “masterpiece tradition” within film historiography, comparative research modes are obviously not high on the agenda. On the contrary, comparison is regarded as potentially impeding the full appreciation and understanding of films and of the realm of cinema. A quite similar diagnosis can be made for research in new cinema history, in which much of the work done so far is frequently focused on very specific local practices of historical cinema culture and concentrates on film exhibition and audience experiences in particular cities, neighborhoods, or venues. Comparison has, however, been on the agenda of new cinema history for a few years now,1 and this call for more comparative work is linked to the awareness that comparison is helpful in trying to understand larger trends, factors, or conditions explaining differences and similarities in historical cinema cultures. It could be argued that comparison is an advanced form of observation that allows us to understand the general issue at hand better than if we limit the scope to one geographical or temporal unit. Maintaining that the recent call for comparison can be regarded as a discipline’s strategy to become methodologically more mature, this chapter will go into some of the methodological opportunities and pitfalls of comparing historical cinema cultures. Reflecting upon comparative work in which we have been involved, we will argue that linking cinema cultures in two or more different geographical and/or temporal contexts entails methodological sophistication. Whereas various kinds of comparison can be identified, it is clear that a comparative approach requires researchers and research teams to be self-critical at every stage of their work. This chapter will then illustrate some of those methodological features by focusing on a case study on Antwerp and Rotterdam. One of the key findings, coming out of a research project comparing cinema’s past in these two major port cities in Belgium 96

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and the Netherlands (Moviegoing at the Docks),2 is that non-cinema-related factors need to be explored more deeply by cinema historians.

The comparative mode in film and cinema studies In disciplines like sociology, demography, or economics, the practice of comparing events, trends, and wider societal issues across cultures or across regional, national, and other geographical confines is among the most common research standards. In these and other disciplines within the social sciences, comparison is regarded as a crucial approach for generating better understanding and coming to wider conclusions. Comparison is commonly seen as an integral part of setting up research designs, of hypothesis testing, and of formulating new theoretical frames or refining existing ones (Grew, 1980; Rosser and Rosser, 2004; Sasaki et al., 2014). In sociological studies, the tradition of employing comparative methods goes back to Emile Durkheim and Max Weber, exemplifying different directions of case-based and variable-based comparison (Ragin and Zaret, 1983; Smelser, 2013). The comparative history of societies has an even longer tradition: emerging as an intellectual field in the eighteenth century, it developed into a well-established discipline in history through the strong traditions of long-term social history, histoire croisée or entangled history (Berger, 2003; Cohen and O’Connor, 2004). Comparison has been high on the agenda in other disciplines within the humanities: comparative literature, for example, is a well-established field (Behdad and Thomas, 2011). Film and cinema studies do not have a similar tradition of theorizing, institutionalizing, and doing comparative research. Within film-oriented studies, work on particular movies, authors and styles largely conceives its object of research as existing within a larger ensemble of shifting aesthetic, generic, societal, or ideological boundaries. Nevertheless, the international dimension of film production, trade, and consumption has always required the presence of the comparative mode in some form or another in film criticism and film studies. The same goes for discussions on cultural transfer or on cross-national flows of movies, genres, or filmmakers, which contain some form of comparison in, for instance, discussions of the relationship between Hollywood and European cinema (e.g. Morrison, 1998; NowellSmith and Ricci, 1998; Trumpbour, 2002) or studies of differences and similarities within a region or continent like Europe (Dyer and Vincendeau, 1992; Fowler, 2002; Biltereyst, Lotze, and Meers, 2012; Timoshkina, Harrod, and Liz, 2015). In most of these studies, however, comparison is often implicit rather than explicit (Berger, 2003: 161). The question is to what degree this research is analytically comparative in the sense of conceiving and using research designs which enable a thoughtful, systematic comparison of cinematic phenomena across different geographic or temporal entities. Within the wider field of film and cinema studies, most of the cross-national work, including studies that deal with issues like film policy and industry (e.g. Hjört and Petrie, 2007; Biltereyst, Maltby, and Meers, 2012), has been presented in the form of edited collections of monocentric studies or parallel descriptions. It is not truly comparative, in the sense of employing clearly defined (and similar) analytical levels, categories, variables, and units of observation. Fields of research linked to new cinema history, such as those dealing with exhibition and cinemagoing, frequently tend to be microhistories on very specific local practices and experiences in one city, neighborhood, or sometimes one venue. An important part of this work relates to memories of cinemagoing and the remembrance of the particularities of the place and the act of consuming pictures as a complex personal and social experience. Studies in this line of research often take Annette Kuhn’s pioneering ethnohistorical work on cinema memories as a point of departure (see Chapter 2). They are commonly inspired 97

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by Doreen Massey’s (1994: 9) conception of space as “the product of interrelations … the sphere of the possibility of the existence of multiplicity” and as “always under construction.” Using oral history accounts, much of this work applies a cultural studies ethos in its attempt to understand cinema as culturally specified and socially embedded. Although these microhistories often integrate their findings into a larger whole and contain traces of comparison (e.g. ­Hubbard, 2003: 261), scholars hesitate to look beyond temporal and spatial confines and reach some overarching tendencies, not to mention generalizations. As this perspective conceives the place/space of the cinema through its complexity and local embeddedness, only a few attempts have been made to operationalize a systematically comparative design. A similar diagnosis of geographical monocentrism can be made for other directions from the perspective of new cinema history (see also Biltereyst and Meers, 2016). This is, for instance, the case for studies that try to capture audience’s film reception by using sources such as cinemagoing statistics, box office, and admission figures (e.g. Harper, 2006, on the Regent Cinema in Portsmouth; Jurca and Sedgwick, 2014, on Philadelphia), or those that rely on programming patterns as an index for audience choice and film popularity (e.g. Sedgwick, 2011, on Sydney). The work on movie venues and film exhibition structures also often focuses upon single case studies, mostly within the confines of one country, region, city, or neighborhood (see examples in Maltby, Biltereyst, and Meers, 2011; Biltereyst, Maltby, and Meers, 2012). Some interesting comparative work has been done on issues of exhibition and programming across city and national borders (e.g. Convents and Dibbets, 2008; Biltereyst and van Oort, 2011; Sedgwick, Pafort-Overduin, and Boter, 2012; Thissen, 2013), and several comparative projects are being conducted, again mainly on film exhibition and programming (see endnote 1). This recent accumulation of studies on various aspects of film exhibition and cinemagoing creates an enormous potential for data to be integrated and compared, for larger patterns to be discovered, and hypotheses to be tested. It would be possible now, as John Sedgwick (2011: 141) argues, to “identify and understand cinemagoing practices within and across communities and territories.” In a similar vein, Richard Maltby (2011: 13) claims that “with common data standards and protocols to ensure interoperability, comparative analysis across regional, national and continental boundaries becomes possible” so that it “contributes to a larger picture and a more complex understanding” of film culture. Arguing that the comparative mode applies to microhistorical enquiry as well, Maltby, Walker, and Walsh (2014: 98) maintain that “whatever their local explanatory aims,” they should have the “capacity for comparison, aggregation, and scaling.”

Comparison and historical cinema cultures One of the strengths of comparative research is to go beyond the peculiarity of the local situation to unravel conditions or factors which explain similarities and differences between two contexts of research. As French historian Marc Bloch (1954/2004) indicated, this process of disentangling trends and factors might be a hugely complex and nearly interminable process. The reason for this complexity lies in the fact that in addition to issues of methods and research design, new questions and challenges arise when scholars endeavor to operationalize comparative historical research on historical cinema cultures. Besides the frequent absence, scarcity, or incompatibility of data to be used for comparing two or more venues, temporal or spatial entities, there is the problem of origin when organizations or institutions with quite different backgrounds, such as newspapers, trade journals or organizations, insurance, or police records are used as sources for historical data. For researchers trying to work comparatively, there is also the need to familiarize themselves with more than one area and its contexts. It is important to recognize, however, that this condition encourages collaborative research. 98

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Comparison also entails specific conceptual and methodological challenges that clearly set it apart from monocultural research. These challenges relate to the peculiarities of the conceptual framework, in which there needs to be equivalence in terms of concepts and methods. Depending on the explanatory problem that is addressed, hypotheses will have to be defined carefully, cases will have to be selected accordingly, and basic units of comparison will have to be sharply demarcated. In a critical use of the comparative mode, these hypotheses must be clearly defined and theoretically well founded, objects must be equivalent in nature, and similar methods should be used in all stages of data collection, processing, and analysis. Within a strictly “orthodox” kind of comparative research, questions also arise on the spatial and temporal proximity of the sites under comparison, stressing the usefulness of the (quasi-)experimental setting in which particular conditions with regard to language, size, and geographic proximity, for instance, are stabilized as much as possible. As an example, this approach raises the question of whether comparing Belgium’s historical cinema culture with the Dutch one is more valid than comparing it with Latin American ones. Key considerations relate to what exactly will be compared and how the comparison will be made. When designing comparative research, concrete decisions will have to be reached about the delineation of space (a country, a region or a county, a city, a neighborhood, a venue, part of a venue, etc.) and time (a year, a month, a day, an evening, a single screening, etc.). Comparative work such as the project we are undertaking with scholars in Mexico (e.g. Lozano et al., 2012), which uses a nearly identical research design to the one we applied in Flanders (Meers, Biltereyst, and Van de Vijver, 2010; Biltereyst, Maltby, and Meers, 2011), can be effective in interrogating some of the seemingly more obvious temporal and spatial dimensions. In a Western European context, a film venue is predominately a fixed building with bricks, stones, and a roof; mobile cinema became a marginalized phenomenon rather quickly, and film programs are announced in mainstream newspapers. In contrast, in a city like Monterrey, Mexico, nighttime mobile and open-air screenings, referred to as terrazas, were a widely developed phenomenon. This difference underlines the importance of often overlooked conditions such as the weather or climate, as well as issues of class, since the terraza cinema experience attracted predominantly lower-class audiences. These class, climatological, material, and spatial dimensions not only emphasize the fluidity of the concept of cinema but also heavily influence the availability and use of sources and research criteria. In the case of Monterrey, terraza screenings for the lower social classes were mostly not listed in newspapers or trade journals and were only discovered through oral histories. Another unexpected complication of the comparative relation is that in Monterrey, movies reappeared under different titles, probably for commercial reasons or programming tactics. Comparative work on these matters needs to tackle questions regarding the definition of the object and units of observation, as well as of the categories and variables to be used while collecting and analyzing data (Grew, 1980; Berger, 2003). Considering research conducted under the new cinema history umbrella, one can readily see that a great variety of qualitative and quantitative methods have been employed. Similarly, very different time and spatial frames have been used, and the comparisons made from this research will have to confront problems of organization, standardization, and verification of data. Some lines of research, such as qualitative microhistories on cinema memories and everyday life experiences, will be more difficult to operationalize in terms of any meaningful comparison. This is especially the case since principles of comparison like selection, abstraction, and a rigorous definition of units, categories, or variables are often perceived as diametrically opposed to writing the history of highly contextualized practices and meanings. 99

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Although research using quantitative data could be considered as more apt for comparison because of the availability of numerical data and statistical software, similar methodological pitfalls and challenges in terms of interoperability and incompatibility occur. In an ideal scenario, with quantitative data on issues like the number of cinemas, seats, or box office revenues, clear agreements can be made at different stages of the research to define hypotheses, a conceptual framework, and temporal and spatial frames and in the selection of objects, units, categories, and variables. In an everyday research context, however, such a rigorous and demanding “truly” comparative methodological framework will be difficult to operationalize within historical research, and other more creative approaches will need to be applied. One such approach is the close collaboration between researchers on those topics and the development of common research standards across the projects. Although the methodological heterogeneity within new cinema historiography does not offer an ideal platform for comparison, it is possible to obtain interesting insights for understanding dis/similarities in cinema cultures, even from those studies that were not conceived as being integrated into a comparative framework. We would argue that the “truly” orthodox comparative design with its rigorous methodological construction does not have a monopoly on the comparative sensibility or on how to investigate dis/similar patterns and the conditions underlying them. In fact, various types or modes of comparison can be identified. First of all, there are all those studies which use different methods and look at different sites – studies which, from a comparative perspective, seem to be quite useless. However, even if they use other research designs, we think that they can be useful in developing an understanding of some wider trends, conditions, and hypotheses. We will try to illustrate this point through our work on the Antwerp–Rotterdam case. A second mode relates to a situation in which studies are brought together that focus on one (more or less) consistent geographical unit but use different methodological frameworks. This type of multimethod/single-site comparison is an individualizing type of comparison because it attempts to discover the cinematic and noncinematic factors that condition or influence cinemagoing and cinema culture in a particular society. An informative example here is the historiographical work on the Netherlands, especially the work done in the slipstream of the groundbreaking Cinema Context project (Dibbets, 2010; see also Chapter 26). In the past few years, scholars in the Netherlands have concentrated on the question of why, compared to other European countries, film attendance has historically been so low there, and why the film exhibition market was relatively undersized in terms of the number of film venues or seats. Although different methods were used (and, at times, other geographical boundaries set), a strong line of research and scholarly debate emerged over the particularities of Dutch cinema culture. Although some of this work operationalized comparison with other countries, including Belgium (e.g. Convents and Dibbets, 2008) and the United Kingdom (­Sedgwick, Pafort-Overduin, and Boter, 2012), Dutch film historians had a very fertile discussion on trends, factors, and conditions explaining the particularities of their national cinema history (e.g. Dibbets, 1986, 2006; Pafort-Overduin, Sedgwick, and Boter, 2010; Thissen, 2013; van Oort, 2016, 2017). The dialogic nature of Dutch historical cinema studies is revealing not only for understanding what happened in the Netherlands. It also underlines how an analysis of both cinematic and non-cinema-related conditions is required to appreciate the larger dynamics of the Dutch film culture. Among the noncinematic conditions, arguments about the religious influence of Calvinism and its view of visual culture and cinema, the vertical stratification of Dutch society, and the role of class have proven important to an explanation of how cinema had difficulties in attracting middle- and upper-class audiences. In addition to this mixture of religious, ideological, and other societal factors, issues related to the film 100

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industry itself have generated hypotheses about the impact of the severe national censorship system, heavy municipal entertainment taxes, and the policy of the Dutch film exhibitors’ association of restricting the number of cinema operations in the country (see discussion in Sedgwick, Pafort-Overduin, and Boter, 2012; Thissen, 2013; van Oort, 2016). The third mode entails a more sophisticated type of comparison, in which aspects of cinema culture are examined in different places by using an identical methodology. In an ideal scenario, researchers working on cinema history in different places collaborate and agree on using a symmetrical methodological structure. This approach enables a more detailed and reliable examination and comparison of data, patterns, and conditions. It also forces researchers to examine more closely the different levels at which national, regional, or urban cinema cultures can be compared. There is a precedent for this: the cross-national research that we are conducting with Mexican and other teams in Colombia, Spain, and the United States is based on our earlier comparative work in Belgium, specifically on cinema’s history in Flemish cities (Meers, Biltereyst, and Van de Vijver, 2010; Biltereyst, Maltby, and Meers, 2011; Biltereyst, Lotze, and Meers, 2012). A fourth and final mode of comparative work on historical cinema cultures relates to what is known as replication. At first glance, this mode of bringing together studies using a similar method and focusing on the same space/place/site seems quite unusual and perhaps even useless. On the other hand, the practice of replication studies is seen in many disciplines as an important principle of research or as a standard procedure in order to gain a better insight into the reliability of earlier findings. Replication, duplication, and reproducibility are certainly not part of the humanities or film studies vocabulary, where they can be seen as potentially erasing the researcher’s creativity and originality. This should not necessarily be the case, however, as is demonstrated by the example of Annette Kuhn making available the interviews conducted for her Cinema Culture in 1930s Britain project (Kuhn, 2002) for future studies (see the interview with Kuhn in this volume; see also Kuhn, Biltereyst, and Meers, 2017). Replication is not only interesting for oral history work on cinemagoing, where subjective bias arises at every level of the collecting, processing, analyzing, and interpreting of accounts. In other fields within new cinema history, interpretation and subjective evaluation are also important, making replication an interesting strategy to explore in testing hypotheses or exploring new dimensions.

Comparing cinema culture in Belgium and the Netherlands To illustrate the particulars of one type of comparison, the remainder of this chapter will focus on a specific case study that combines elements of the first mode – comparing different sites using different methods and datasets – and the third mode – examining different locations using a single methodology. Starting from preexisting research results from earlier projects on both sides of the Dutch-Belgian border, we were confronted with problems familiar to the comparative historian, namely difficulties in finding and harmonizing data, defining standardized concepts, and interpreting the results in order to move from description to explanation. Belgium and the Netherlands are suited for historical comparison because the two countries have broad socioeconomic, geographic, and cultural similarities but are substantially divergent in their cinema cultures. This raises the question of how to explain a divergence in the intensity of cinemagoing between neighboring countries that are both relatively small, constitutional monarchies with open economies, in strategic positions on the North Sea coast. A majority of Belgians, living mainly in Flanders, also share the Dutch language with their northern European neighbors. Since 1830, when Belgium and the Netherlands became separate states, the histories of both nations have remained intertwined. The Dutch historian Ernst Kossmann identified many 101

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parallels in the nineteenth- and twentieth-century development of modern political parties, ­ideologies, and practices that transcended obvious religious differences: in contrast to Belgium, Protestant minorities were a dominant force in Dutch politics and social life (1978, 1987: 378, 385). From a European comparative perspective, both countries developed similar corporatist societal organizations (McCann, 1995: 60–61; de Jong and Solar, 1998: 107–108). During the last quarter of the nineteenth century, a process called “pillarization” created an intermediate layer between state, society, and religion, structured vertically in ideological groups of Catholics, Liberals, Socialists, and, in the Netherlands, Protestants; while in Flanders, Nationalist-separatist groups also tried to build a segregated “pillar” of organizations. Notwithstanding these broad similarities, there were significant variations in both pillarized systems (Righart, 1986). The coexistence of the French-speaking Walloons and the Dutch-speaking Flemish, with Brussels as a bilingual capital, has complicated the notion of the Belgian national state. In the Netherlands, the antithesis between Catholics and Protestants was central to sociopolitical dynamics. According to Blom and Lamberts, the Belgian state lost considerable autonomy to the pillars, which made them more resistant to the changes that rapidly broke down Dutch pillarization during the 1960s and 1970s (Blom and Lamberts, 2003: 379–381). The most pointed historical distinction between both economies might well be the early industrialization of Belgium compared to the late economic modernization of the Netherlands, although the sharpness of these differences in pace evened out in the course of the twentieth century (de Jong and Solar, 1998). Therefore, although both countries seem highly suitable for comparison, it remains a dilemma for the historian whether to focus on the similarities (the phenomenon of pillarization in both countries, for example) or point out the differences (the distinct character of pillarization in each country) when searching for explanations for the divergences in cinema cultures. Notwithstanding the many resemblances between both neighboring societies, their ­moviegoing industries and cultures diverged strongly, despite the fact that neither country developed its own film production industry. Throughout most of the twentieth century, ­Belgium boasted some of the highest number of cinema screens and seats per capita in E ­ urope, as well as very high cinema attendance rates, whereas the Netherlands sat at the bottom of the same statistics. While Belgium reached its all-time highest number of 1,585 cinemas in 1957, the Netherlands reached a maximum number of only 565 cinemas in 1961 (Figure 8.1).

Figure 8.1  N  umber of screens per 1,000 inhabitants in Belgium and the Netherlands (data compiled on the basis of Gyory and Glas, 1992)

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Figure 8.2  A  verage annual cinema attendance per capita in Belgium and the Netherlands (in millions; data compiled on the basis of Gyory and Glas, 1992)

In 1960, when the Netherlands counted 11.4 million inhabitants and Belgium 9.1 million, the average Dutch inhabitant visited the cinema less than five times a year, while the average Belgian went almost twice as often (Biltereyst and Meers, 2007; Centraal Bureau voor de Statistiek; FOD Economie; Figure 8.2). From the 1970s onward, the number of screens per inhabitant in both countries tended to converge, but attendance in Belgium still remains significantly higher.

Units of comparison or defining cinema Even if a rich collection of data and research is available from previous research projects at both city and country levels, the comparatist encounters a variety of difficulties. One hindrance, typical for comparisons of the first mode as categorized above, is that the data collected in various research projects were structured in different ways. Most of the Dutch data concerned the prewar period, while most of the Belgian data covered the postwar era. Even where a temporal overlap exists, the cleaning and harmonizing of data into one single dataset proved to be laborious. Data harmonization forces scholars to make decisions about definitions of concepts and units of comparison that might not have been foregrounded had they not been demanded by the comparative framework. A fundamental problem, resulting from this Dutch-Belgian comparison, is how to define what constitutes a cinema. The decision has a direct impact on the interpretation of the collected data. Explaining this impact requires some understanding and background knowledge of the historical context in which cinema as an industry operated in the respective societies. In the Netherlands, the definition of a cinema operation was mainly shaped by the legal and economic delineation of the national trade organization NBB or Nederlandse Bioscoopbond (Netherlands Cinema Union). Operations that did not meet this definition were marginalized or pushed out of the market. Since the NBB had almost total control over the industry, cinemas that did not follow the regulations were simply cut off from the supply of films. A marginal circuit of “non-commercial” cinemas did exist, mostly consisting of ­politico-religious organizations screening Christian or Socialist films and to a lesser degree cinephile societies screening mostly art films. Since the early interwar period, the NBB had pursued the marginalization of these secondary, often pillarized circuits (van Oort, 2017), and in the national statistics provided by Dutch government agencies (in part based 103

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on data coming from the NBB), these screenings were omitted. In Belgium, the situation was ­m arkedly different. Unlike the Netherlands, the cinema industry in Belgium was less centralized around one corporative trade organization regulating the market. Instead, many Catholic, Socialist, and to a lesser extent, Liberal, and Flemish-Nationalist cinemas coexisted alongside commercial cinemas, not-for-profit and for-profit alike. Rather than a trade organization, the market decided what constituted a viable cinema operation, and the statistics of the Belgian industry also encompass those screenings that would fall into the Dutch category of “non-commercial” and therefore would be absent from most Dutch statistics.3 Even if we accept that this was a marginal sector in the Dutch market, it would be complicated to verify that statement without further data collection, which would be an extremely complex task because of the very absence of these data from the records. It is, therefore, clear that the structure of the industry in both countries affects not only the definition of basic units of comparison but also the quality and characteristics of the data collected by film historians, the industry, or policy bodies. Accepting biases described above, the centralized organization in the Netherlands was relatively accurate, systematic, and ­reliable, which means that records exist. By comparison, the Belgian situation is more complex, perhaps reflecting the state of sources that historians generally are more likely to encounter. Diverging definitions of the very subject of inquiry (i.e. cinema) influence how that same subject is measured and examined.

Comparing and mapping cinema city cultures Turning to the Moviegoing at the Docks project, it is unnecessary to say that these issues of comparability exist both at the national and urban levels of comparing cinema cultures. When limiting the comparison to two cities, Antwerp and Rotterdam are an appropriate choice. In size and population, the two cities were quite comparable. With populations of a few hundred thousand citizens each, these mid-range cities were the second most important in their respective countries, after their capitals. Both also boasted rapidly expanding industrial harbor complexes, which were important for their national economies. Nevertheless, there are important asymmetries to consider. One factor that stands out was the destruction of Rotterdam’s inner city at the start of the Second World War, since it complicates a balanced comparison of the postwar situation. To give one practical example of the issues encountered when comparing at a local level: in Rotterdam, elaborate statistics exist on the volume of municipal moviegoing because local cinema taxes had the side effect of creating a detailed documentation of ticket sales. In Antwerp, however, no such additional local tax existed, and only incidental statistics on moviegoing have survived, complicating a very basic comparison of the number of moviegoers over time. If we can overcome some of these problems of data collection and interpretation and succeed in establishing a common dataset, what kind of results can we gain from the basic quantitative comparison we have named as the third mode, applying a single methodology to both cases? Here, we focus on a relatively straightforward question that can be addressed with a basic dataset: what are the locations of cinemas in both cities over time and what mapping patterns appear throughout the twentieth century? For this question, the location, years of opening and closing, as well as the seating capacity of all cinemas in Antwerp and Rotterdam have been analyzed. One additional problem we face is the geographer’s question of how to define the boundaries of the city. Do we keep to the municipal border, leaving the surrounding (suburban) conglomerates out of the picture? This decision affects the outcome of any analysis since 104

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Antwerp had a very lively cinema culture located in the municipalities surrounding the city, while in the municipalities surrounding Rotterdam cinema led a very muted existence, if cinemas were present at all. Further problems also arise in Rotterdam, where the ­Passage Bioscoop (Passage Cinema) in the neighboring city of Schiedam (morphologically and ­i nfrastructurally closely attached to Rotterdam) was from the 1930s onward run by Rotterdam’s most prominent exhibitor, the Tuschinski company, and was consistently included in the weekly newspaper listings. From the industry’s own marketing discourse and from the perspective of inhabitants of the western part of Rotterdam, who were only a short tram ride away from the Passage Bioscoop, the cinema could be argued to be part of ­Rotterdam’s film exhibition infrastructure. Of course, these definition and demarcation issues can be part of any historian’s methodological challenges, but their complexity increases when a comparative perspective is introduced. In the context of the Moviegoing at the Docks project, we built a series of longitudinal maps, showing the pattern of cinema locations within municipal borders per decade in the period after the Second World War (for which the data on seating capacity are more com­ otterdam’s plete than for earlier years).4 By comparison to Antwerp, the destruction of R city center in 1940 reinforced the asymmetry that had already existed before the bombardment wiped out most of Rotterdam’s cinemas. The postwar map series, nonetheless, shows a continuation of the prewar pattern of a much higher number and wider distribution of cinemas in Antwerp where, as well as strong concentrations in the city center (around the Central Station and the De Keyzerlei shopping street), numerous cinemas existed in more peripheral areas, including several neighborhood cinemas. ­Concentration in the city center was stronger in Rotterdam, where the periphery was much thinner. This difference becomes even more accentuated when we zoom out to the level of the agglomerations: in contrast to Antwerp, the municipalities surrounding Rotterdam were only sparsely populated by cinemas. Interestingly, however, the cinema mapping for the decades after 1970 shows quite some remarkable similarities between the two cities: the rapid thinning out of cinemas in both city centers between 1980 and 2000, leaving multiplexes divided between the center and the outskirts of each city, and the presence of one or two smaller art houses or independent theaters. Such geographical visualizations can be useful for pointing out those areas where cinemas seem to be markedly lacking. In Antwerp, the area southeast of the center remains void of cinemas. Interestingly, this is a rather affluent residential zone. The same goes for the region northeast of the Rotterdam center, which is dominated by (upper) middle-class districts: no cinema operations existed here. The spatial analysis of location patterns can be a useful heuristic tool to formulate new questions that require deeper investigation; in this case, pointing out the negative by identifying an absence. Obviously, further data collection and analysis are needed to establish a more precise correlation between the socioeconomic status of the various districts and the locations of cinemas. So, a next step would be to correlate the basic spatial data on cinemas with noncinematic contextual data such as demographics, the degree of urbanization, political and religious affiliations, indicators of class, and other socioeconomic and cultural variables. Such historical statistics are, however, hard to find, especially if we want to use them to analyze a city. It would require data at the level of districts (or even streets or individual blocks), and adding another layer of complexity, data compatible for comparative analysis would be needed for both cities. Moreover, we must be careful in interpreting the relation between cinema location and the socioeconomic status of its surroundings, as the Allen-Singer exchange in the 1990s on the meaning of cinema locations in Manhattan has taught us. The social 105

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profile of the neighborhood in which a cinema is located cannot necessarily be equated to its patronage: even cinemas positioned in an affluent district can draw a less well-off crowd (Singer, 1995; Allen, 1996). In the following paragraphs, we offer a modest illustration of how to combine basic information on cinema locations with contextual data, in this case demographics, using population growth rate as an indicator of suburbanization. Even if such a complex phenomenon as suburbanization cannot be reduced to a simple growth figure, it can serve as a general indication of the urban dynamics of the postwar period. A comparison highlights the different responses in both cities to postwar suburbanization and the decline of moviegoing that set in from the 1960s onward. When we combine cinema locations in Antwerp and Rotterdam with population density, it is unsurprising to discover that cinemas are concentrated in the most populous areas (see also Biltereyst and Meers, 2014). A rather different and more complex picture emerges when looking at population growth rates, which clearly show how in both cities the center deflated while the surrounding suburban areas expanded during the postwar period (see Figures 8.3 and 8.4). 5 In the Rotterdam agglomeration, cinema exhibition clearly did not relocate on a significant scale to follow the shifting population but remained strongly concentrated geographically in the city center. The map depicts a chronology of cinema building: it indicates when a cinema operating during this period was opened, accentuating cinema openings during the 1950s with larger circles. The rate of population growth for each municipality and urban district is visualized by the shade of gray: the darker the area, the higher the population growth between 1948 and 1968. Only a few cinemas opened during the 1950s in peripheral growth areas (Spijkenisse in the southwest, Ridderkerk in the southeast, and Vlaardingen in the central east). In the eastern municipality of Capelle aan den IJssel, which was one of the fastest growing suburban concentrations, no cinema was ever opened. Again, these

Figure 8.3  D  ata on the population growth rates between 1948 and 1968 and the opening years of cinemas in Rotterdam and surroundings

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Figure 8.4  D  ata on the population growth rates between 1947 and 1971 and the opening years of cinemas in Antwerp and surroundings

geo-visualizations can point toward remarkable absences, such as the notable fact that one of the largest shopping malls in the Netherlands (Oosterhof, later renamed Alexandrium), which opened in 1984 on the eastern border of the city, never incorporated a cinema to cater to the vast suburban population in the Alexanderpolder and adjacent Capelle aan den IJssel. When we investigate the population growth in the Antwerp agglomeration, the map (Figure 8.4) shows a decreasing population in Antwerp and a growth in surrounding municipalities (see also Loots and Hove, 1986). During the postwar period, the expansion of peripheral cinemas was much more pronounced than in Rotterdam. First of all, quite a number of cinemas operating in this period had already been established in the periphery before the Second World War (small black dots). In the first five years after the war (medium-sized dark-gray circles), a total of fourteen new cinemas mostly opened in the center. During the following five years (large dark-gray circles), ten new cinemas opened both in the center and the periphery. Between 1956 and 1960, more new cinemas opened in the outlying regions than in the center (large light-gray circles). Between 1960 and 1970, only two new cinemas were built (medium-sized light-gray circles). Subsequently, when we relate the chronology of cinema openings to a chronology of cinema closings (not depicted here), we can distill an idea of the postwar cinema boom in the periphery of Antwerp. Of the many out-of-the-city cinemas built during the 1950s, especially in the second half of this decade, the majority of them closed in the following decade. The first wave of closures occurred during the second half of the 1950s and was concentrated in the city. This was followed by a considerable number of cinema closures during the early 1960s, both in the city and, even more so, in the periphery. This modest analysis of the locations of cinemas in two cities, related to some basic population figures, can deliver some of the distinct geographical manifestations of cinema within the urban space, especially the center–periphery dynamics. In Rotterdam, the center was 107

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more dominant in the overall pattern of cinema locations, and even when populations shifted out of the center, cinema exhibition remained relatively unresponsive and inert. In Antwerp, ­however, more differentiation existed between the center cinema and the neighborhood cinema: the former included the more high-end first- and second-run cinemas, while the latter offered a more formal moviegoing experience usually programming third- or lower-run fare.6 The analysis shows that the Antwerp exhibition sector was more dynamic, responding to the suburbanization process even if the newly opened suburban cinemas did not last very long.

Conclusion Arguing that strengthening comparative research within new cinema history might be helpful for bringing the field to a next level of methodological, analytical, and conceptual sophistication, this chapter has focused on a case study of cinema culture in the harbor cities of Antwerp and Rotterdam. The chapter was intentionally structured as a methodological showcase: an exercise in examining cinema’s past in two more-or-less equivalent cities in neighboring countries with comparable backgrounds in terms of their industrial, socioeconomic, and cultural conditions. One key outcome of this exercise in comparative cinema historiography is that a cross-city/country comparison underlines the need to take into account other factors beyond the differences in film policy and industrial organization in the local and national film sectors. The comparative approach also stresses the need to integrate wider, n ­ on-cinema-related conditions into the analysis: in this case, different industrial-economic policy traditions, public transportation systems, and the impact of geopolitical processes and events such as the Second World War’s impact on the urban architectural and spatial environment. Even if one limits the scope of analysis to one particular aspect of historical cinema culture such as exhibition patterns, one cannot escape the sense that comparative research is a highly complex, time-consuming, and at times quite frustrating exercise. Along with the problem of generating “comparable” equivalent data and other difficulties typically linked to cross-cultural comparison (e.g. data verification, collaboration, familiarization), comparative research becomes a never-ending enterprise, because the number of circumstantial conditions which one should consider seems endless. Although comparative research is ­challenging, it can be extremely productive in better contextualizing similarities, differences, and varieties in historical cinema cultures. Differently from monocentric approaches, comparative cinema historiography also makes researchers more aware of the impact of often overlooked but crucial conditions such as religion, climate, and wider leisure and popular cultural traditions. From this perspective, it might even be interesting to compare quite unequivalent cinema cultures like those in Africa, Latin America, or Europe, precisely in an attempt to understand the wider environment in which cinema operated. For an emergent field like new cinema history, it is helpful to acknowledge that the rigorous “orthodox” version of comparative research is only one of the possible options and that other, methodologically less stringent modes of comparison can be extremely useful as well. Oral history accounts of cinema memory in two or more geographical settings, for instance, even if their interview protocols were differently constructed, can be used for illuminating different practices and patterns of cinemagoing in those places. We therefore think that other subfields of new cinema history such as film programming analysis or oral history-inspired work on audiences can greatly benefit from comparative approaches, despite the methodological challenges they might generate. For new cinema historians, comparison should be conceived as a powerful tool for exploring meaningful differences and unexpected relations, as much as a key instrument for revising 108

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hypotheses on the social experiences of cinema. Comparison should be regarded as an iterative process of trial and error, which allows for the continuous refinement of hypotheses on cinema’s societal importance. Paraphrasing Marc Bloch, one of the strongest defenders of comparative history, one could argue that the task of the new cinema historian lies precisely in trying to indicate and explain relations between historical phenomena around cinema as a societal institution (see also Chapter 1). In this iterative and relational research agenda, geographical comparison is only one of the routes to take. Another is linked to data triangulation or to the enterprise of exploring relations between locations, programs, films, people, discourses, and other key aspects of historical cinema culture (Biltereyst, Lotze, and Meers, 2012). Another, highly underdeveloped line of comparative research relates to a cross-sectoral juxtaposition of cinema and other forms of leisure, such as theatrical or musical performances.7 Potentially, this type of comparison could bring into sharper focus the specificity of the cinematic experience in relation to other forms of entertainment, but, perhaps more importantly, it could also demonstrate how, from the audiences’ point of view, moviegoing blended into a wide range of leisure activities.

Notes 1 Comparison was a key focus at the HoMER/NECS Conference in Potsdam (Germany, 27–29 July 2016, http://necs.org/conference/homer/ [Accessed 20 November 2018]), and several collaborative networks were made in order to conduct comparative research on film exhibition, programming, and audience experiences, such as the Cinema City Cultures network on projects in Belgium, Brazil, Colombia, Mexico, Spain, and the United States (www.cinemacitycultures. com/ [Accessed 20 November 2018]) and the European Cinema Audiences network on Bari, Ghent, and Leicester (http://europeancinemaaudiences.org/ [Accessed 20 November 2018]). 2 See project: Moviegoing at the docks. A media historical comparative analysis of cinema cultures in Antwerp (Flanders) and Rotterdam (the Netherlands) (1910–1990), Pegasus Marie Curie Fellowship postdoc fellowship, EU/FWO-Flanders, 2015–2016, Thunnis van Oort (researcher), Philippe Meers (promotor). 3 We want to leave aside the discussion about the distinction between commercial and noncommercial, which complicates things even further. We can refer to an ongoing comparative research project on the history of cinema culture in Flanders and the Netherlands, see CINEMAPS: A data-driven investigation of cinema markets in The Netherlands and Flanders (1950–1975), project by UvA/Create, UGhent and UAntwerpen, supervisors: Julia Noordegraaf and Jaap Boter (both ­Universiteit van Amsterdam), Daniel Biltereyst (UGhent), and Philippe Meers (Universiteit ­A ntwerpen). See www.cinemacitycultures.com/cinemaps-a-datadriven-investigation-of-­cinemamarkets.html [Accessed 20 November 2018]. 4 For the longitudinal series of maps on cinemas in Antwerp and Rotterdam, see www.­cinemacitycultures. com/moviegoing-at-the-docks-in-antwerp-and-rotterdam.html [Accessed 20 November 2018]. 5 For maps (in color), showing the relationship between population growth rates and the o ­ pening years of cinemas in Antwerp and Rotterdam, see www.cinemacitycultures.com/­moviegoing-atthe-docks-in-antwerp-and-rotterdam.html [Accessed 20 November 2018]. 6 This supports what we know from oral history testimonies (Meers, Biltereyst, and Van de Vijver, 2010). 7 Exploring the potential of comparative history across disciplinary boundaries of musicology, film, and theater studies was the topic of the conference “European Performing Arts Dataverse,” held in Amsterdam on 9 November 2017, co-organized by the Create research program at University of Amsterdam and the Flemish scientific research network on “Spectacle Culture.”

References Allen, R.C. (1996) “Manhattan Myopia: or, Oh! Iowa!” Cinema Journal 35(3): 75–103. Behdad, A. and Thomas, D. (eds.) (2011) A Companion to Comparative Literature. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell.

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Daniel Biltereyst, Thunnis van Oort, and Philippe Meers Berger, S. (2003) “Comparative History.” In S. Berger, H. Feldner, and K. Passmore (eds.) Writing History: Theory and Practice. London: Hodder Arnold (pp. 161–179). Biltereyst, D., Lotze, K., and Meers, Ph. (2012) “Triangulation in Historical Audience Research: ­Reflections and Experiences from a Multi-Methodological Research Project on Cinema Audiences in Flanders.” Participations: Journal of Audience & Reception Studies 9(2): 690–715. Biltereyst, D., Maltby, R., and Meers, Ph. (eds.) (2012) Cinema, Audiences and Modernity¨: New Perspectives on European Cinema History. London: Routledge. Biltereyst, D. and Meers, Ph. (eds.) (2007) De Verlichte Stad. Een geschiedenis van bioscopen, filmvertoningen en filmcultuur in Vlaanderen. Leuven: Lannoo Campus. Biltereyst, D. and Meers, Ph. (2014) “Mapping Film Exhibition in Flanders (1920–1990): A Diachronic Analysis of Cinema Culture Combined with Demographic and Geographic Data.” In J. Hallam and L. Roberts (eds.) Locating the Moving Image: New Approaches to Film and Place. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press (pp. 80–105). Biltereyst, D. and Meers, Ph. (2016) “New Cinema History and the Comparative Mode: Reflections on Comparing Historical Cinema Cultures.” Alphaville: Journal of Film and Media Studies, Special Issue: Cinema Heritage in Europe 11: 13–32. Biltereyst, D., Meers, Ph., and Van de Vijver, L. (2011) “Social Class, Experiences of Distinction and Cinema in Postwar Ghent.” In R. Maltby, D. Biltereyst, and Ph. Meers (eds.) Explorations in New Cinema History. Approaches and Case Studies. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell (pp. 101–124). Biltereyst, D. and van Oort, Th. (2011) “Censuurmodaliteiten, disciplineringspraktijken en film. Een comparatieve analyse van de historische receptie van Sergei Eisensteins film Pantserkruiser Potemkin (1925) in België en Nederland.” Tijdschrift voor Sociale en Economische Geschiedenis 8(1): 53–82. Bloch, M. (1954/2004) The Historian’s Craft. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Blom, J.C.H. and Lamberts, E. (2003) Geschiedenis van de Nederlanden. Baarn: HB Uitgevers. Centraal Bureau voor de Statistiek. (2003) “Bioscoop- en filmhuisbezoek.” http://statline.cbs.nl/ Statweb/publication/?V W=T&DM=SLNL&PA=37650&D1=20-24&D2=a&­H D=1510091147&HDR=T&STB=G1 [Accessed 9 October 2015]. Cohen, D. and O’Connor, M. (eds.) (2004) Comparison and History: Europe in Cross-National Perspective. New York, NY: Routledge. Convents, G. and Dibbets, K. (2008) “Verschiedene Welten. Kinokultur in Brüssel und in Amsterdam 1905–1930.” In C. Müller and H. Segeberg (eds.) Kinoöffentlichkeit/Cinema’s Public Sphere (1895–1920). Marburg: Schüren Verlag (pp. 50–56). de Jong, H.J. and Solar, P.M. (1998) “The Benelux Countries.” In B.J. Foley (ed.) European Economies since the Second World War. London: MacMillan (pp. 107–108). Dibbets, K. (1986) “Het  bioscoopbedrijf   tussen  twee   wereldoorlogen.” In K. Dibbets and F. van der Maden (eds.) Geschiedenis van de Nederlandse film en bioscoop tot 1940. Weesp: Wereldvenster (pp. 229–270). Dibbets, K. (2006) “Neutraal in een verzuild land: het taboe van de Nederlandse filmcultuur.” Tijdschrift voor Mediageschiedenis 9(2): 46–64. Dibbets, K. (2010) “Cinema Context and the Genes of Film History.” New Review of Film and Television Studies 8(3): 331–342. Dyer, R. and Vincendeau, G. (eds.) (1992) Popular European Cinema. London: Routledge. FOD Economie, (2011) “Exploitatie van de bioscoopzalen.” http://statbel.fgov.be/nl/binaries/­ Bioscopen%20-%202010%20-%201%20-%20Evolutie_tcm325-218118.pdf [Accessed 9 October 2015; no longer accessible]. Fowler, C. (ed.) (2002) The European Cinema Reader. London: Routledge. Grew, R. (1980) “The Case of Comparing Histories.” The American Historical Review 85(4): 763–778. Gyory, M. and Glas, G. (1992) Statistiques du cinéma en Europe. Brussels: CERICA. Harper, S. (2006) “Fragmentation and Crisis.” Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television 26(3): 361–394. Hjört, M. and Petrie, D. (eds.) (2007) The Cinema of Small Nations. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Hubbard, P. (2003) “A Good Night Out? Multiplex Cinemas as Sites of Embodied Leisure.” Leisure Studies, 22: 255–272. Jurca, C. and Sedgwick, J. (2014) “The Film’s the Thing: Moviegoing in Philadelphia, 1935–36.” Film History. An International Journal 26(4): 58–83. Kossmann, E.H. (1978) The Low Countries: 1780–1940. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kossmann, E.H. (1987) “Eender en Anders. De evenwijdigheid van de Belgische en Nederlandse Geschiedenis na 1830.” In E.H. Kossmann (ed.) Politieke theorie en geschiedenis. Amsterdam: Bert Bakker (pp. 238–254).

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Comparing historical cinema cultures Kuhn, A. (2002) An Everyday Magic: Cinema and Cultural Memory. London: I.B. Tauris. Kuhn, A., Biltereyst, D., and Meers, Ph. (2017) “Memories of Cinemagoing and Film Experience: An Introduction.” Memory Studies 10(1): 3–16. Loots, I. and Hove, E. (1986) Stadsvlucht?: Een eeuw demografische ontwikkeling in het Antwerpse. Leuven: Acco. Lozano, J.C., Biltereyst, D., Frankenberg, L., Meers, Ph., and Hinojosa, L. (2012) “Exhibición y programación cinematográfica en Monterrey, México de 1922 a 1962: un estudio de caso desde la perspectiva de la ‘nueva historia del cine.’” Global Media Journal 9(18): 73–94. Maltby, R. (2011) “New Cinema Histories.” In R. Maltby, D. Biltereyst, and Ph. Meers (eds.) Explorations in New Cinema History: Approaches and Case Studies. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell (pp. 3–40). Maltby, R., Biltereyst, D., and Meers, Ph. (eds.) (2011) Explorations in New Cinema History: Approaches and Case Studies. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell. Maltby, R., Walker, D., and Walsh, M. (2014) “Digital Methods in New Cinema History.” In P. Arthur and K. Bode (eds.) Advancing Digital Humanities: Research, Methods, Theories. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan (pp. 95–112). Massey, D. (1994) Space, Place and Gender. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. McCann, D. (1995) Small States, Open Markets and the Organization of Business Interests. Aldershot: Dartmouth. Meers, Ph., Biltereyst, D., and Van de Vijver, L. (2010) “Metropolitan vs Rural Cinema-Going in Flanders, 1925–1975.” Screen 51(3): 272–280. Morrison, J. (1998) Passport to Hollywood: Hollywood Films, European Directors. Albany, NY: State ­University of New York Press. Nowell-Smith, G. and Ricci, S. (eds.) (1998) Hollywood and Europe: Economics, Culture, National Identity, 1945–95. London: British Film Institute. Pafort-Overduin, C., Sedgwick, J., and Boter, J. (2010) “Drie mogelijke verklaringen voor de ­stagnerende ontwikkeling van het Nederlandse bioscoopbedrijf in de jaren dertig.” Tijdschrift voor Mediageschiedenis 13(2): 37–59. Ragin, C. and Zaret, D. (1983) “Theory and Method in Comparative Research: Two Strategies.” Social Forces 61(3): 731–754. Righart, H. (1986) De katholieke zuil in Europa, het ontstaan van verzuiling onder katholieken in Oostenrijk, Zwitserland, België en Nederland. Meppel and Amsterdam: Boom. Rosser, J.B. and Rosser, M. (2004) Comparative Economics in a Transforming World Economy. 2nd ed. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. ­ omparative Sasaki, M., Goldstone, J., Zimmermann, E., and Sanderson, S.K. (2014) Concise Encyclopedia of C Sociology. Boston, MA: Brill. Sedgwick, J. (2011) “Patterns in First-Run and Suburban Filmgoing in Sydney in the mid-1930s.” In R. Maltby, D. Biltereyst, and Ph. Meers (eds.) Explorations in New Cinema Histories: Approaches and Case Studies. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell (pp. 140–158). Sedgwick, J., Pafort-Overduin, C., and Boter, J. (2012) “Explanations for the Restrained Development of the Dutch Cinema Market in the 1930s.” Enterprise and Society 13(3): 634–671. Singer, B. (1995) “Manhattan Nickelodeon: New Data on Audiences and Exhibitors.” Cinema Journal 34(3): 5–35. Smelser, N.J. (2013) Comparative Methods in the Social Sciences. New Orleans, LA: Quid Pro Books. [originally published by Prentice-Hall, 1976]. Thissen, J. (2013) “Understanding Dutch Film Culture: A Comparative Approach.” Alphaville: Journal of Film and Screen Media, 6 (Winter) http://www.alphavillejournal.com/Issue6/HTML/­A rticleThissen. html [Accessed 20 November 2018]. ­ eaning, Timoshkina, A., Harrod, M., and Liz, M. (2015) The Europeanness of European Cinema: Identity, M Globalisation. London: I.B. Tauris. Trumpbour, J. (2002) Selling Hollywood to the World: U. S. and European Struggles for Mastery of the Global Film Industry, 1920–1950. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press. van Oort, T. (2016) “Industrial Organization of Film Exhibitors in the Low Countries: Comparing the Netherlands and Belgium, 1945–1960.” Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television 36(2): 475–498. van Oort, T. (2017) “Resurrection in Slow Motion. The Delayed Restoration of the Cinema Exhibition Industry in Post-War Rotterdam (1940–1965).” European Review of History. https://doi.org/10. 1080/13507486.2017.1374928. [Accessed 20 November 2018].

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9 The archeology of itinerant film exhibition Unpacking the Brinton Entertainment Company Collection Kathryn Fuller-Seeley What can we learn from one small 1904 datebook about the historical development of ­A merican film exhibition? This case study addresses some of the new cinema history’s methodological challenges of contextualizing fragmentary evidence of the past, by examining the business practices of a pioneering itinerant film exhibition troupe (Maltby, ­Biltereyst, and Meers, 2011). I will frame some preliminary findings from documents found in the recently accessioned papers of exhibitor W. Frank Brinton (1857–1919) of Washington, Iowa.1 Starting in the mid-1880s with a one-man show featuring magic ­lantern slides of the Holy Land, Brinton’s fascination with new mechanical technologies of showmanship led him to expand his program over time, incorporating a phonograph and motion picture projector into his repertoire to construct a multimedia show combining education and entertainment. Between 1897 and 1908, Brinton and his young wife Indiana, along with two or three assistants, toured extensively around Iowa and the Midwestern Plains states with a two-hour program that incorporated films, music and songs, vaudeville performances from a blackface comic and a midget, stereopticon slides, lectures, and demonstrations of model airships, which Brinton sent floating around opera house interiors (sometimes piloted by the midget). What new understanding can this material provide about the varieties of ways in which film practice developed, as elaborate itinerant movie shows paved the way for stationary nickelodeon practices and later feature film programs? How can we compare the Brinton Entertainment Company’s operation with that of other documented American traveling troupes (Musser and Nelson, 1991; Fuller, 1996/2001; Waller, 2003; Pryluck, 2008)? By teasing out the significance of data in the fragmentary materials of the collection and newspaper reviews of the show, in the context of other operators, we can learn about the varieties of programing philosophies, economic practices, regional and local factors of culture, geography, and regulation, all of which affected the success or failure of these shadowy participants in cinema exhibition history. Determining how typical or exceptional Brinton’s film exhibition troupe was is still a matter of some speculation. The barriers to entry into this new entertainment field were relatively low ($1,000 or less), with new or used projectors and films easily available for

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purchase. While several major outfits played the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic states (such as Raff and G ­ ammon’s lessees, the Vitagraph exhibitors, and Lyman Howe’s and Archie Shepherd’s multiple crews; Musser and Nelson, 1991), most nonmetropolitan areas of the nation experienced early motion pictures through shows put on by small individually or family-run companies. The most modest troupes flitted between villages, playing one-night stands. They might disband in a few months when the films grew old, local interest waned, competition increased, or accidental fires burnt up their films and equipment. Historians’ scouring of digitized historical small-town newspapers is uncovering dozens of these previously unknown ephemeral itinerant troupes. Other traveling film exhibitors (like Frank Brinton and Bert and Fannie Cook of Cooperstown, NY), endowed with entrepreneurial desire, management skills, showmanship, and (with luck) sufficient financing, were quite successful. Perhaps a hundred or more itinerant companies traveled around various regional territories in the United States between 1896 and 1910. The opening of thousands of stationary nickelodeons in the latter part of the decade would drive the majority of itinerants out of business. Some, like Brinton and the Cooks, would become nickelodeon managers. A few continued operating in more remote Western and Southern areas which could only support a few regular theaters – such as ministers who used films in their religious work or entrepreneurs who established rural circuits (Waller, 1995; Caddoo, 2014). Extensive research in the increasing numbers of small-town newspapers available for digital research is enabling film historians to excavate the operations of these long-forgotten exhibitors to a greater extent than we could previously have done. Occasionally, a cache of documents surfaces to document the history of an itinerant troupe. The Brinton Entertainment Company collection’s existence is due to the passionate interest and efforts of Mike Zahs, retired schoolteacher from Washington, a small town of 5,000 people in southeastern Iowa, who in 1981 rescued the collection of sixteen reels of deteriorating films (110–150 subjects), 700 glass slides, projectors, and boxes of documents from the basement of the residence of the executor of Brinton’s estate and donated it to the University of Iowa Library’s special collections.2 While Zahs and filmmakers ­A ndrew ­Sherburne, Tommy Haines, and John Richard (of Northland Films) labor to identify, ­preserve, and ­recirculate the early motion pictures found in the collection and produce a documentary film, Saving Brinton (2017), I have sought to unpack the paper evidence to better understand the context of the show’s operation. A highlight of the Brinton collection is a small pocket datebook which documents the show’s travels, engagements, and box office receipts between 1904 and 1908. Other items of interest in the collection include early motion picture producer catalogs marked with Brinton’s orders, a small amount of correspondence with film distributors and opera house managers, and selected show reviews clipped out of area newspapers. The Brinton collection, however, contains few significant business papers and almost no program notes or detailed advertising materials that would provide fuller indications of how the programs were structured, how the entertainment elements were combined, or of the tenor of company member interactions or relationships with theater managers and audiences. Research topics that can be explored through this datebook include an analysis of the extent to which the troupe’s operations were organized and the level of Brinton’s financial success (Figure 9.1). Was this merely a wealthy man’s hobby, or a profitable business? Can patterns be identified of the types of towns and theaters in which they performed, and what audiences (differentiated by geography, social class, and urban or rural culture) they targeted?

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Figure 9.1  Brinton Entertainment Company datebook 1904–1908 (collection of Mike Zahs)

The 1904–1908 datebook The third page of the datebook, written in Indiana Brinton’s small, neat handwriting, begins to document the itinerant company’s schedule for the first twenty days of January 1904. For each day of the week, the city and venue in which the company performed is listed, as well as the percentage of the proceeds they negotiated to pay for rental of the theater and the net box office receipts. In those three weeks, the Brinton Company performed seventeen times and laid off on the three Sundays. They played in seven towns, four of them for three-night stands. Their share of the box office receipts ranged from a high of $111.80 to a low of $19.40. Total box office receipts for the seventeen shows were $996.00 (see Table 9.1). Among the preliminary conclusions that can be drawn from these data is the sense that the Brinton Entertainment Company appeared to be operating as a successful and well-­ organized troupe. It is striking how small the communities were in which the Brintons played; how regularly they were able to book three-night stands; how steady their route was, with no empty nights or canceled engagements in between shows; and how much money they earned. These qualities remained remarkably stable throughout the five years covered in the Brinton account book.

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The archeology of itinerant film exhibition Table 9.1  B  rinton datebook, January 1904, page 3 (collection of Mike Zahs) Date (1904)

Town

Sponsors’ share of box office

Net (comments)

Jan. 1 Jan. 2 Jan. 3

What Cheer, IA What Cheer, IA Sunday, What Cheer, IA

Opera House (OH) 35% OH 35%

$36.75 $46.05

Jan. 4 Jan. 5 Jan. 6 Jan. 7 Jan. 8 Jan. 9 Jan. 10

OH 25% OH 25% OH 25% OH 25% OH 25% OH 25%

$21.90 $60.20 $44.25 $57.15 $46.55 $47.65 (rain and sleet)

Jan. 11 Jan. 12 Jan. 13 Jan. 14 Jan. 15 Jan. 16 Jan. 17

Montezuma, IA Montezuma, IA Montezuma, IA North English, IA Williamsburg, IA Williamsburg, IA Sunday left Williamsburg stayed all night at Cedar Rapids Independence, IA Independence, IA Independence, IA Monticello, IA Monticello, IA Monticello, IA Sunday Monticello, IA

OH 50% OH 50% OH 50% OH 30% OH 30% OH 30%

$47.22 $85.12 $82.60 $89.55 $96.60 $111.80

Jan. 18 Jan. 19 Jan. 20

Cascade, IA Cascade, IA Cascade, IA

OH 25% OH 25% OH 25%

$19.40 $48.75 $32.50 (rain and sleet)

The towns and villages in which Brintons performed were quite small in population in 1900: What Cheer Montezuma North English Williamsburg Independence Monticello Cascade

2,746 1,210 683 1,100 3,656 2,104 1,266

Most of these communities were primarily farm market towns with a modicum of manufacturing employment (What Cheer was a fading coal-mining town). These small ­centers were located often twenty miles or more distant from larger population centers like ­Ottumwa, Oskaloosa, Marshalltown, or Iowa City. In an era before automobile transportation became widespread, none but the wealthiest residents of these small towns would be likely to travel to the larger cities for an evening’s entertainment, so it seems that Brinton followed a strategy of targeting rural and small-town audiences. In the first four months of 1904 (the spring season), the datebook indicated that the ­Brinton Company performed 101 dates – on all but four days, excluding Sundays. Twenty percent of their programs were given in villages of under 1,000 inhabitants, such as North English. A further 20 percent of Brinton programs were performed in towns like ­Montezuma,

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ranging between 1,000 and 2,000 in population. The US census referred to communities of fewer than 2,500 inhabitants like these as falling below the minimum population level to be ­considered urban. Across the five years covered in the Brinton datebook, about 45 percent of their programs took place in towns under 2,500 in population. A further 45 percent of the shows occurred in slightly larger towns of between 2,500 and 6,000 people, such as Independence, or their hometown of Washington. Only about 10 percent of the Brinton Company shows were given in cities of between 8,000 and 20,000 citizens, ranging from Iowa City to occasional forays into Ottumwa, Marshalltown, or Rochester and Winona, Minnesota. Of the 101 dates played in spring 1904, only nine Brinton shows (in ­Marshalltown, ­Winona, and Mankato) took place in towns of 10,000 or more people. While they did well in Winona ($262), the proceeds of shows in Marshalltown ($165) were just average for a three-night stand, and the Mankato stand was meager ($84). Indiana Brinton noted of the Mankato shows in the datebook “poorly advertised and rainy weather.” In fact, the Brintons earned more money in the much smaller eastern Iowa community of Anamosa, whose population was 2,891 ($212). Overall, by comparison to their shows in very small communities, the Brintons did not earn appreciably larger box office amounts when they performed in large cities. In those villages and small county towns, the Brintons could more easily build and trade on their reputation for presenting high-quality programs. The towns in which the Brintons performed were located significant distances from each other. In the first three weeks of 1904, the company traveled 207 miles, ranging from ten to as many as eighty miles between towns, bypassing other small settlements and larger cities along the way. They were not simply barnstorming from one town to the nearest settlement up the road (as other very small itinerant film troupes like the Cook and Harris Company did), but they deliberately traveled significant distances to particular places. They most probably traveled by train or interurban streetcars. Unfortunately, the Brinton Company papers contain only the most fragmentary evidence of how these engagements were originally booked. In 1903, Frank Brinton employed an ­advance agent (Allen O. Gorrell) to travel several weeks ahead of the Brinton troupe, securing bookings at local opera houses and whenever possible, making arrangements with local religious or civic organizations to sponsor the show, sell tickets, and promote the program ahead of its arrival, in exchange for a percentage of the box office receipts. It is unclear if Brinton scheduled his shows in the 1904–1908 period with assistance or by himself (there is a small amount of correspondence from opera house managers, asking Brinton to ­perform in their communities). It is possible that Frank Brinton was sufficiently organized to make subsequent bookings on his own, after he had established relationships with opera house managers and community groups in each town. The Brinton Company returned to the same towns each year but not in a strictly organized fashion. Additionally, each year, ­Brinton branched away from the highly competitive show territory of eastern Iowa in different ­d irections, to eastern Nebraska, central Kansas, or northern Missouri. One year he even took the company south through Oklahoma, Indian Territory, and Texas (as Brinton owned property in Texas that he wished to visit). The majority of small-town Midwestern opera houses were still independently operated by local managers in the early 1900s, not organized into a formal booking circuit like the urban vaudeville organizations. Full-time exhibition of motion pictures would subsume most of these individual small theaters into larger distribution circuits after 1910. In the three weeks of late January–February 1904, the Brinton Company played other towns in the northeastern districts of Iowa (Manchester; 104 miles west to Marshalltown; then back 92 miles east to Iowa City; and shorter jumps further east to West Branch, 116

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Tipton, and Anamosa), skirting around the larger cities like Cedar Rapids, Waterloo, and Dubuque. The Brinton troupe then ventured to southern Minnesota, playing somewhat larger towns (like Owatonna, Faribault, Rochester, and Winona) between 10 February and 4 April, before winding back through north central Iowa (Clarion and Mason City) to end their season. Frank Brinton journeyed on alone to St. Louis on 27 April to attend the World’s Fair and investigate the latest airship inventions, while Indiana returned back home to Washington. In the sixteen-week spring 1904 season, the Brintons had performed in 33 different towns (in Minnesota, they returned back to seven cities after their initial stand to play additional one-night fill-in performances). They earned a total of $5,014 at the box office. In each community the Brinton Company visited (unless it was the tiniest village), Frank Brinton strove to perform for three nights in a row. This was a testament to his success and his reputation and also to the large stock of films, stereopticon slides, and illustrated song entertainment that he carried with the show. Like the repertory theatrical troupes that also played these Midwestern opera houses, Brinton assumed the local audience base in the towns he visited was not sufficient to attract multiple audiences to a single production in each town. His troupe needed the resources to offer a variety of productions to attract the active theatergoers to more than one performance. Brinton carried sufficient films and slides with him to be able to exhibit three different programs during a three-night stand. This represented a huge financial investment of probably several thousand dollars. Smaller troupes such as the Cook and Harris Company were only able to play one-night stands in any stop during their travels, because they could not afford to purchase enough films to mount a second night’s program. There must have been significant economies and efficiencies for the Brinton Company when they were able to perform three nights in a town. Advertising and promotion of the show could be more effective. It would be less wear and tear on performers to stay multiple nights in one town and less stress on the film projector not to have to completely pack up and transport the equipment after every single show. Of course, the savings were balanced by the significant economic investment in enough recent films to fill three performances. In a 18 June 1904 interview in the Washington Evening Journal, Frank Brinton publicized his company’s ability to play three-night stands as a measure of the quality and value of the program. One-night stand companies should be viewed skeptically, he claimed to local audiences: they would take admission money, put on a meager show, and then be gone the next morning before the local community could complain, moving on before negative reviews could circulate. Significantly for the development of local film culture, Brinton’s multiple shows in one locality helped to build regular audience habits that would benefit the stationary nickelodeons that eventually took away his audiences. The Brinton Company performed primarily at community opera houses and theaters, in a pattern similar to the largest itinerant exhibitors like Lyman Howe’s troupes, rather than that followed by smaller exhibitors. According to the Brinton datebook, in spring 1904, more than half of their shows were contracted to receive 70–75 percent of the box office proceeds, while the rest of the time opera house managers deducted 50 percent of the ticket sales. The Brinton Company was able to negotiate with managers to obtain a significant number of bookings at that more favorable percentage rate all through 1908, but the reasons for this success are as yet unclear. Other itinerant film exhibition troupes, such as the Cooks, were only able to secure the better 70–75 percent rental rate when a local church society or fraternal lodge group agreed to sponsor the Cooks’ show, advertise the show around town, and sell tickets ahead of the performance. If the show took place in the local opera house, 117

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management would donate a portion of its share of the proceeds to the community group. Fragmentary records in the Brinton collection do not indicate if the troupe’s shows were sponsored by local organizations. In comparison, primary source documentation from the Cook and Harris Company, an eastern troupe of itinerant exhibitors based in Cooperstown, New York, demonstrate many similarities in their operation and some significant differences (Fuller, 1996/2001). Bert and Fannie Cook took their show to very small communities across upstate New York, ­Vermont, and New Hampshire between 1905 and 1911. Their four-person group created a two-hour-long program of films and illustrated songs. They did not incorporate the ­elements of ­vaudeville, religious education, or aircraft demonstration that the Brinton show featured, but instead focused on family-friendly fare of polite comedies, domestic melodramas, and sentimental ballads. The Cooks’ schedule looked more like barnstorming, as they played one-night stands in a series of communities accessed by local train and trolley routes, traveling about six to ten miles per day in between exhibitions. Most of the Cooks’ shows were performed in lodge halls and churches, and they were more often sponsored by fraternal organizations and women’s church groups. The Cooks appear to have done more advertising and provided longer and more detailed printed show programs. Their performances, however, featured older films than the Brinton show, and the Cooks probably turned from film purchases to weekly film rentals sooner than Brinton (as he had larger capital sums to invest in films). From a comparison of available box office tallies, the Cooks also earned significantly less income than Brinton. This is explained in part by greater levels of exhibitor competition – Upstate New York was crowded with a half dozen or more rival traveling film exhibition troupes, attempting to attract the same audiences, whereas the Brintons only faced one or two competitors. The Cooks earned perhaps 50 percent or less of what the Brinton Company took in. Still, it was a solid if modest income for hardworking entrepreneurs. How can the box office figures from the Brinton Company datebook be analyzed? This is a challenge, for the Brinton papers include only the smallest fragments of data on the troupe’s daily, weekly, or season-length expenses, such as salaries, costs of lodging, food and transportation, advertising for each show, the work of an advance booking agent, or amortization costs of film purchases. Brinton’s records do not even account for how many performers traveled with the company. Three people were a minimum, and four or five were more likely. Frank Brinton served as his own projectionist and lectured and sometimes sang. Indiana Brinton’s duties were vague; she may have kept records, sold tickets, and secured the box office sales proceeds during and after the show. Mostly, her job was to appear statuesque while sitting in the opera house gallery, serving as an advertisement for the aesthetic quality of the show. Brinton probably had some combination of an illustrated song singer or vaudeville performer, and a musician or pianist, and an assistant who could help with unpacking, moving, and setting up the film projector and trunks of film reels. In the 1904–1907 period, when the Brinton Company performed full time during the fall and spring seasons, they earned about $8,000–10,000 a year. Their summer operations could add an additional $800–$4,500. In 1906, their box office receipts totaled $13,775, which would be equivalent to about $366,000 in 2016 figures. Brinton once bragged to a newspaper reporter that he was able to send home $100 in profits every week of the traveling season. Frank Brinton supplemented his fall and spring tours each year, experimenting with a variety of summer film exhibition venues. Between 1899 and 1903, he showed films at an outdoor theater at the Sans Souci amusement park near Cedar Rapids. Starting in 1904, he participated in several town-sponsored Fourth of July events in which he exhibited films in 118

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outdoors settings to large crowds. In the 1905–1907 period, he invested in a large tent for summer film exhibitions, perhaps with a black top and side curtains to reduce the light inside the tent as much as possible. Brinton took the tent to surrounding towns during county fair times in July, August, and September. But the tent required a crew of ten people to set up. While in the 1905–1906 summer season they often earned large box office receipts, the business was very unpredictable. Stormy weather dogged their summer operations. On 23 September 1907, after a show in West Chester, Iowa, Indiana noted in the datebook “gave tent away.” In 1907 and 1908, Frank and Indiana Brinton turned to performances at regional ­Chautauqua gatherings, contracting with a speakers’ service to present their films and educational lectures at meetings in Illinois, Iowa, and Wisconsin. In contrast to Brinton’s efforts to exhibit films year round, the Cooks laid off touring in May (as audience attendance steeply declined); they spent their summers at Sylvan Beach, a ­working-class resort community near Syracuse, New York. Bert Cook assisted a friend who operated a tintype photograph booth and worked the front desk at the Forest Home Hotel. In the evening, Bert and Fannie performed illustrated songs in the hotel lobby. Both the Brintons and Cooks struggled to meet seasonal challenges and the rapidly changing amusement marketplace.

Contextualizing information found outside of the Brinton collection Despite the wealth of information that the Brinton datebook provides, there are important aspects of the troupe’s operation that remain obfuscated. It does not tell us anything about the content and structure of the complete two-hour program. The Cook and Harris Company, like several other itinerants, distributed four-page printed programs that described the content of their show. Frustratingly, no printed programs or notes about show content were found with the Brinton materials. Sixteen reels of film accompanied Brinton’s paper documents; Brinton’s motion picture collection is a group of subjects dating from 1899 to about 1908 that features several unique magic “trick” films produced by George Méliès and numerous travelogue scenes of international locations. But we do not know how frequently Brinton screened them. Brinton’s papers also contained several early film distributors’ catalogs with marks that indicate which subjects interested him. Nevertheless, even identifying the films Brinton saved will not substantially inform us about the structure and content of his company’s average program as the seasons passed. With this paucity of internal evidence, local newspapers, especially Brinton’s hometown Washington Evening Journal, become a vital resource for piecing together the story of Brinton’s operations. Paul Moore (2012), Richard Abel (2015), and other film historians have explored the importance of newspapers for publicizing, documenting, and commenting on film exhibition in American localities. From historical Iowa newspapers accessed through online databases, I am gleaning contextual information about local reception of the Brinton show and about the depth of relationships Brinton built with newspaper editors and cultural gatekeepers in his region’s villages and towns. Beginning in the late 1880s, Frank Brinton performed a one-man show in small towns across eastern Iowa, exhibiting stereopticon slides, playing ­phonograph records, and giving lectures focused on Christian biblical history themes, including documentary tours and lectures about the Holy Land. By the time he began projecting films as part of his program, Brinton had already spent ten years cementing his regional reputation with church and civic groups and that smoothed his way to becoming a motion picture exhibitor who mixed commercial films with his older religious-travelogue slides. It is newspaper articles that document how Brinton staged his first performance featuring motion pictures at the Graham Opera House in Washington in July 1898, five months after 119

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marrying Indiana and fourteen months after the first exhibition of motion pictures took place in Washington. The topics of Brinton’s early film subjects (similar to that of most other itinerant exhibitors) included national and international travel and patriotic journalistic coverage of the Spanish-American War, combined with some elements of comedy (a washerwom­a n’s troubles) and “cinema attractions” spectacle in a group of hand-­colored Melies magic scenes. In September 1899, Brinton created a journalistic sensation across southeastern Iowa by publicly promising to launch and pilot a full-size airship at the county fairgrounds. To the indignation of thousands of admission-paying spectators, the aircraft did not leave the ground. Area newspapers belittled the failed aviator, for years afterward referring to him as “Airship Brinton.” Continuing to experiment with model aircraft but focusing further on his motion picture exhibition career between 1900 and 1903, Brinton put on film shows which featured documentary footage of travel and “reality” films. “The Great Train ­Robbery” was an enormously successful film for him in spring 1904, as he celebrated his fiftieth film-and-slide exhibition performance at the Graham. Brinton continued to travel across Iowa and to nearby states every fall and spring, returning home annually to put on several performances in Washington. (In April 1907, the Washington newspaper announced Brinton’s 62nd show at the Graham.) Reviews of the company’s performances and occasional interviews with Brinton in area publications provide additional contextualizing information. Apparently, he cared a great deal about curating his film and entertainment program. He did not merely exhibit whatever newest film subjects were available but took care to construct a multimedia show, placing special emphasis on religious and educational films, bolstered by the scientific lectures he delivered and the demonstrations he made of his model airships. Brinton’s show regularly earned positive newspaper publicity in the communities he frequented. However, he almost never placed space advertisements for his program in local newspapers, as other itinerant film exhibitors regularly did in order to garner favorable comments from local editors. Brinton indeed must have placed faith in the ongoing personal relationships he fostered with editors and cultural leaders in the communities he visited. In 1908, Frank Brinton’s continuing health problems combined with the increasing competition from nickelodeon movie theaters sharply reduced the troupe’s income. To draw audiences, the Brinton troupe began to allow ladies to enter free or offered two admissions for one ticket. Interviewed in his hometown Washington newspaper on the eve of a big performance in November 1908, Brinton was asked if the new stationary theaters would put his outfit out of business. He argued for the superiority of his version of film entertainment over that of any movie show being given at nickelodeons. In his disparaging opinion, the “store shows” took place in hastily remodeled storefront shops, with kitchen chairs for seats, a flat floor which limited the audiences’ view, and flickering, blurry film images projected on a small white-painted square on the back wall. Unlike Brinton’s carefully selected and elaborately produced evening-long programs costing 25 cents, nickel store shows offered a forty-five- to sixty-minute program indiscriminately made up of mediocre films showing chases, violent fights, and crude comic action: The show they give in opera houses is vastly different from the store shows over the country. They give a program which lasts for two hours, filling the whole evening and using pictures which they carefully select. By their own selection and choice they get a superior program, linking an interesting connection in the form of a tour, described with a lecture, and producing [with] mechanical effects [and] devices all the sounds and noises of the actions of the scene, which add to the realism and make a different class 120

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of attraction. These of course require a large stage in which to be manipulated as does also a picture if it is to be made life size, hence it is easy to perceive that it is impossible to give this kind of a show in a store building which cannot possibly be equipped like a large opera house whose scenery and stage settings enclosing the screen also enhance the beauty of the pictures. (“The Brinton Show,” Washington Evening  Journal, 25 November 1908) Nickelodeon-style film exhibition outpaced Brinton’s more expensive programs in audience popularity, however, and by spring 1909, Frank Brinton folded his touring company and became manager of Washington’s Graham Opera House, at which he booked a combination of films, vaudeville, and touring theatrical companies. In the summer of 1909, he also established an “airdome” or stationary outdoor movie theater, in Washington, while two additional nickel theaters also entertained Washington film fans. He managed the movie theater for ten years. While the 62-year-old Brinton died in 1919, the Graham persevered as a central community gathering place. Motion pictures are still being shown regularly in the State Theater (as the Graham was rechristened in 1931) to this day, including occasional special exhibitions of films from the Brinton collection. The 120-year-old building has recently been recognized by the Guinness Book of World Records as the world’s oldest continually operating cinema theater.3

Conclusion As ephemeral as they might seem to the history of later Hollywood-dominated film exhibition, itinerant film show people played a formative role in the development of practices of exhibition and distribution of motion pictures across the United States in the period between cinema’s invention in the late 1890s and the establishment of permanent movie theaters. Providing an innovative alternative to the brief performance offered by including a few films at the end of an urban vaudeville show, the traveling exhibitors crafted evening-long entertainment programs that highlighted the short films of the “cinema of attractions” era. They collected individual films into somewhat-organized playlists, and incorporated those gathered film subjects into multimedia programs that were often varied to suit the specific interests and talents of performers in the traveling companies. The nomadic companies, sometimes touring wide distances across many states, at other times working circuits that remained close to their home bases, were important public intermediaries between motion picture media and far-flung populations. The entrepreneurial outreach of the traveling troupes familiarized large numbers of people outside major metropolitan areas with motion picture technology and film’s unique forms of storytelling. The enterprise of the itinerant exhibitors built habits of moviegoing and desires to see movie shows. An ironic measure of their success is that by 1909–1910, in territory after territory, their audiences were taken away by stationary nickelodeons, which opened in settlements as small as villages of 500 or fewer people in the East and Midwest. For historians, the value of unpacking the Brinton Entertainment Company papers lies in analyzing a micro-set of data which contributes to a more complex understanding of the stories of how the American hinterlands became incorporated into a nationwide film culture, and how film presentation practice evolved over time. In motion pictures’ earliest days, itinerant film exhibitors like Brinton demonstrated to audiences that films could be more than just brief curiosities and conditioned them to regular attendance at the permanent movie shows which began to crop up in their neighborhoods. Examining his datebook 121

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covering the period from 1904 to 1908 can be a starting point for considering the possible continuities of cinema exhibition and showmanship across an era in which scholars studying film subjects stress significant change in film length and narrative content and complexity. Nevertheless, Brinton’s datebook is but a single fragment that cannot fully explain his show’s content or its impact on the Midwestern audiences he serviced. The historian’s sometimes frustrating challenge is to continue searching to locate additional corroborating data (perhaps through data mining of digitized regional newspapers or unearthing documents from other exhibitors) to better understand the comparative typicality or uniqueness of Brinton’s operation and from there to develop more sophisticated hypotheses about the cultural impact of itinerant exhibitors’ practices.

Notes 1 Guide to the Brinton Entertainment Company papers. http://collguides.lib.uiowa.edu/?msc1000 [Accessed 20 November 2018]. 2 Owen, T. (2015) “Neglected Boxes in a Basement Hold a Treasure of Early Film.” Humanities Jan./ Feb., 36:1 www.neh.gov/humanities/2015/januaryfebruary/statement/saving-silent-films [Accessed 20 November 2018]. Heinrich, G. (2016) “Now 100 Years Later, New Audiences Discover a Legendary Outsider,” Little Village 7 January 2016, http://littlevillagemag.com/100-years-laternew-audiences-discover-legendary-outsider/ [Accessed 20 November 2018]. 3 http://cinematreasures.org/theaters/18210. www.fridleytheatres.com/location/7461/State-TheatreShowtimes [Accessed 20 November 2018].

References Abel, R. (2015) Menus for Movieland: Newspapers and the Emergence of American Film Culture, 1913–1916. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Caddoo, C. (2014) Envisioning Freedom: Cinema and the Building of Modern Black Life. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Fuller, K. H. (1996/2001) At the Picture Show: Small-Town Audiences and the Creation of Movie Fan Culture. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, rpt. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press. Maltby, R., Biltereyst, D., and Meers, Ph. (eds.) (2011) Explorations in New Cinema History: Approaches and Case Studies. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell. Moore, P. S. (2012) “Advance Newspaper Publicity for the Vitascope and the Mass Address of Cinema’s Reading Public.” In A. Gaudreault, N. Dulac, and S. Hidalgo (eds.) A Companion to Early Cinema. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell (pp. 381–397). Musser, C. and Nelson, C. (1991) High-Class Moving Pictures: Lyman H. Howe and the Forgotten Era of Traveling Exhibition, 1880–1920. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Pryluck, C. (2008) “The Itinerant Movie Show and the Development of the Film Industry.” In K. H. Fuller-Seeley (ed.) Hollywood in the Neighborhood: Historical Case Studies of Local Moviegoing. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press (pp. 37–52). Sherburne, A., Haines, T., and Richard, J. (2017) Saving Brinton. [film] Iowa City, IA: Northland Films. Waller, G. A. (1995) Main Street Amusements: Movies and Commercial Entertainment in a Southern City, 1896–1930. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press. Waller, G. A. (2003) “Robert Southard and the History of Traveling Film Exhibition.” Film Quarterly 57(2): 2–14.

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10 Cinema history as social history Retrospect and prospect Judith Thissen So long as cinema history remains solipsistically committed to medium-specificity, starting and ending with the film [as text], then the history of entertainment will remain no more than an entertaining diversion occupying the illustrative margins of other histories. (Maltby, 2006: 85)

This chapter takes up the challenge to redraw the contours of an integrated approach to the history of cinemagoing as a social practice and to demonstrate by example what kind of research questions this entails. In commemoration of the tenth anniversary of ­R ichard ­Maltby’s watershed article “On the Prospect of Writing Cinema History from Below” (2006), I look both forward and back. For good reasons, the new cinema history has become to signify a “shift away from the content of films to consider their circulation and c­ onsumption, and to examine the cinema as a site of social and cultural exchange” (Maltby, 2011: 3). But was this shift away from the film text radical enough? Does the new cinema history really open up to a history in the footsteps of E.P. Thompson: a history that restores the agency of ordinary people and situates their everyday (and not-so-everyday) experiences in the context of broader societal processes and transformations? Is it really a “social turn” in film ­h istoriography? And last but not least, have we been able to abandon the medium-specific approach of film studies and enhance the relevance of our research for other disciplines?

A (not so) modest proposal In his groundbreaking and in many respects foundational article, Maltby (2006) proposed to make a clear-cut distinction between “an aesthetic history of textual relationships” (film history), on the one hand, and on the other hand, “a socio-cultural history of the economic institution of cinema” (cinema history). Maltby (2006: 84) explains: The history of American cinema is not exclusively the history of its products any more than the history of railroads is the history of locomotives. The development of locomotive design forms part of the history of railroads, but so, far more substantially, do government land policies and patterns of agricultural settlement. 123

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In other words, the history of cinema should include studying the material conditions under which movies were produced, distributed, and consumed. But there was more at stake: a well-justified frustration with the insularity of film studies. What emerged as a key motive behind his “modest proposal” (Maltby’s qualification) was the question “what would it take for cinema history to matter more?” In fact, a year later this question became the title of the revised version of the initial article (Maltby, 2007). The most interesting aspect for me was the bold answer: “for cinema history to matter more, it must engage with the social history of which it is a part” (Maltby, 2006: 85). In theory, then, the new cinema history implied a far more radical break away from the narrowness of traditional film scholarship than merely expanding and enhancing the scope of cinema studies. But that’s not exactly what has happened so far. A closer look at the current state of the field (conferences, anthologies) shows that the new cinema history has not yet produced a genuine turn toward social history or the corresponding paradigm shift. Despite a strong tendency toward multidisciplinary methods of analysis, most new cinema history publications deal almost exclusively with questions concerning the distribution, exhibition, and consumption of films. Put differently, the centrality of the film as text has been abandoned in favor of a central focus on the movie theater and its audiences. However, the field remains reluctant to abandon the medium-specific approach of film studies and expand its boundaries. Hence, the range of questions that most new cinema history scholars ask is severely restricted and so are the types of answers that they find. In fact, since the 2000s, one can observe a retreat from macrohistorical questions, by which I mean questions which deal with “the study of big structures and large processes within particular world systems” (Tilly, 1984: 74). In the 1990s, the issue of cinema’s relationship to modernity was central to the new film historiography, which developed after the publication of Film History: Theory and Practice (Allen and Gomery, 1985) and concentrated on the medium’s emergence and early developments. Such a shared conceptual framework (or a set of concepts) is missing in current new cinema history research. Tellingly, with some rare exceptions, the modernity debate remains restricted to the silent era (e.g. Fuller-Seeley, 2008; Biltereyst, Maltby, and Meers, 2012). Despite their common roots, we can actually witness a growing gap between new cinema historiography and the research agenda of Domitor, the international society for the study of early cinema. In recent years, the latter has reinvented itself by abandoning the centrality of the object of film and film-focused questions to include the study of magic lantern shows, theater, vaudeville, the circus, and other entertainments of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It is quite remarkable that even such a comparative cross-media approach seems a bridge too far for cinema historians who put audiences at the center of their research because from the perspective of those same audiences, the boundaries between different media and entertainment forms have always been fluid. In fact, these boundaries are becoming increasingly meaningless in the digital age.

The micro and the macro In my view, the issue is not so much where our research starts and where it ends – with the film, the exhibitor, the movie theater, or the audience – but what kinds of questions we ask in the first place and how we integrate insights from other disciplines into our own analysis. Let me take the example of microhistories of local film exhibition and reception, a format that proliferates within new cinema history. The problem for me is not that these projects are narrowly confined case studies of specific cities, neighborhoods, or movie theaters. With Charles Tilly (1984: 74), “I believe passionately in the value of getting the microhistory right in order to understand the macro history.” There is, however, the danger inherent in local history that it has a tendency to look for ever more empirical data and details, rather 124

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than for larger explanatory frameworks. Such “parochialism” does not help us to see the big picture of cinema’s function in society and make our research relevant for a broader public, academic, and nonacademic. In other words, microstudies of local cinema practices should not obscure the importance of a better understanding of long-term trends and developments across space and time. One way to avoid the latent narrowness of local history is by “asking large questions in small places” ( Joyner, 2004: 153). This phrase captures the programmatic ambitions of microhistory at its best. Carlo Ginzburg, the author of The Cheese and the Worms (Il formaggio e i vermi, 1976), a classic of Italian microhistory, insists on the importance of contextualization and “a constant back-and-forth between micro- and macrohistory, between close-ups and extreme long shots so as to continually thrust back into the discussion the comprehensive vision of the historical process through apparent exceptions and cases of brief duration” (2012: 207). Translated to the practice of cinema historiography, this implies that we have to contextualize our investigations in the field of general history as well as in contingent fields like television history and the history of the press. Another way to break away from the insularity of the local case study approach is to engage in comparative research (Thissen, 2013; Biltereyst and Meers, 2016). Comparative history combines very well with the idea of microhistory as it encourages us to explore larger questions. Even a small-scale comparison of film culture in two communities helps to move beyond the “village level” and make connections between particular circumstances and developments which may otherwise have seemed marginal or unique. Like microhistory, comparative history entails specific conceptual and methodological challenges. A comparison of apples and oranges is rarely meaningful. As Daniel Biltereyst and Philippe Meers point out, “the key question, of course, is what exactly will be compared and how” (2016: 18). In sharp contrast to film studies, comparative research has a long tradition in the field of social history. Without studying differences and similarities between groups, it would be difficult to say something about patterns of inclusion and exclusion in the social, economic, and cultural domains. Social historians often rely on quantitative methods adapted from the social sciences. We can see a similar trend within new cinema history, where comparative research is first and foremost associated with big data analysis (e.g. Maltby, Biltereyst, and Meers, 2011). But there is also a qualitative tradition in social history upon which we can build: the community studies of 1980s American historiography. In particular, I like to single out Roy Rosenzweig’s Eight Hours for What We Will: Workers and Leisure in an Industrial City, 1870–1920 (1983) and Cheap Amusements: Working Women and Leisure in Turn-of-the-Century New York by Kathy Peiss (1986). Both studies exemplify how local histories of leisure can provide building blocks for understanding the emergence of mass culture, the concomitant transformation of working-class life, and cinema’s specific role in this complex process. Rosenzweig and Peiss are able to capture the complexity of sociocultural change precisely because they do not focus on one single medium or recreational activity but compare a range of commercial and noncommercial entertainments, including saloons, amusement parks, movie theaters, dance halls, and Fourth of July celebrations. Like Thompson’s seminal work The Making of the English Working Class (1963), these community studies seek to reconstruct the workers’ everyday-life experiences and restore working-class agency. By doing so, they break away from more narrowly confined economic and statistical analyses of social change. Similarly, microhistory can be seen as a response to the pitfalls of quantitative history, which from the mid-1950s to the mid-1970s dominated historiography. It came out of the growing dissatisfaction with a research model that left little room for the individual, the singular, the local, and everything else that did not fit into “serial history” with its insistence on structure, repetition, and continuity (Ginzburg, 2012). 125

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Ideally, cinema historians combine qualitative and quantitative methods. This was a vital aspect of Maltby’s conceptualization of the new cinema historiography along with his ­proposition to engage with social history. Perhaps, where it went wrong was the brazen a­ mbition of a  ­“Montaillou of cinema history” (2006: 91) – a reference to Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie’s 500+-page multilayered study of everyday life in a small French village in the early fourteenth century, one of the greatest works of French historiography. In retrospect, we can say that this was a mission impossible for a field that was and still is in its infancy. In the remainder of this chapter, I will adopt a minimalist approach to our common mission and demonstrate with a concrete example from my own research how we can move between different levels of analysis.

Film culture in the country My current research project deals with film culture in France and the Netherlands in the period of postwar reconstruction and the “golden age” of the welfare state (1945–early 1970s). After the initial years of wartime-related scarcity and hardship, life was marked for most people in Western Europe by growing economic prosperity and expanding social benefits, as well as the widespread embrace of mass consumer culture. Tellingly, in French, this era is referred to as les Trente Glorieuses – the Glorious Thirty. In particular, I am interested in ­understanding the place and meaning of the cinema in rural society in these years, which witnessed a profound transformation of everyday life in the countryside through the m ­ echanization of agricultural labor, the building of new schools and factories, better roads, increased mobility, and access to electronic communication technologies – private telephones, radio, and television. How did the cinema fit into this larger process of rural modernization? Both in France and in the Netherlands, the late 1940s and 1950s were the heydays for small-town and rural film exhibition (Dibbets, 1980; Forest, 1995; Thissen, 2016). Why did country people start to go to the movies in much greater numbers after the Liberation than they had done before the Second World War? Where and how did they watch films? What genres and subjects did they prefer and how did their taste compare to that of the metropolitan audiences? How did film exhibitors cater to specific rural demands (if they did at all)? How did going to the movies interact with other forms of sociability? These are bottom-up questions posed from the perspective of the film viewers and their lived experiences of filmgoing. Conversely, I am also interested in top-down forgings of cultural identity around mass entertainment and consumer capitalism. How did the public and private cultural institutions of the postwar era seek to shape film consumption? How did regional newspapers write about mass entertainment in general and the movies in particular? And how did these regional discourses relate to welfare state ideals of national homogenization in the cultural and socioeconomic domains? Was there any resistance from the church and other more traditional forces? Research into ideological dimensions of rural cultural politics seems particularly relevant for understanding cinemagoing in postwar France, where the discourse of cinephilia took the form of an almost nationalist cultural discourse, asserting an intimate and unique historical relationship between the French and cinematography.

Saint-Benin-des-Bois Let me zoom in on a case study from my work on France to exemplify how one can explore on a local-level cinema’s contribution to the process of rural modernization and the tensions that went with it. The starting point is a set of two postcards of Saint-Benin-des-Bois, a tiny village in the Nièvre, a profoundly rural area in central France (Figures 10.1 and 10.2). 126

Figure 10.1  P  ostcard Saint-Benin-des-Bois, La Place, posted in 1908 Source: Collection of author.

Figure 10.2  P  ostcard Saint-Benin-des-Bois, posted in 1963 (publisher logo damaged) Source: Collection of author.

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The oldest card dates from the early 1900s and the other from the late 1950s. Together they ­v isualize the transformation of everyday life in the village. Despite obvious signs of ­continuity – the church, the houses with the flower pots in the windows, the unpaved road – the comparison suggests a narrative of growing prosperity and well-being: the arrival of electricity and motorized transportation, housing improvement and the village’s integration into the national fabric of mass consumer culture. At the same time, the census data tell us a rather different story, one of rural flight: the local population shrank from 691 in 1901 to 313 in 1962. In an eerie way, this process too is reflected in the second postcard, which shows an empty square. The population decline continued in the second half of the twentieth century. According to the last census, today about 170 people live in Saint-Benin-des-Bois. Although rarely used by social historians, picture postcards are an extremely rich source of historical evidence to learn about everyday life, not only because of the visual information that they convey but also because of their widespread use as a means of informal communication. Around 1900, postcards rapidly developed into a mass medium. In no other country, they were as popular as in France, which had a huge postcard industry employing around 30,000 people at its peak. Like the cinematograph, the postcard craze was initially very much an urban phenomenon. Hundreds of view cards captured the hustle and bustle of Paris and presented the reader with emblematic images of metropolitan modernity. However, there are also thousands that document the coming of the new age in the countryside: views of factories, railway stations, hotels, newly-built city halls, post offices, (traveling) cinemas, and so on. One can scarcely exaggerate the significance of view cards not only in promoting rural modernity but also in recording the vanishing world of peasant France – a fundamental transformation which sociologist Henri Mendras (1988) describes as the “Second French Revolution.” What I propose is a close reading of the most recent postcard (Figure 10.2), analyzing in detail what we see in the image and read on the other side and contextualizing this information. The card was produced by the Parisian company Artistic but most likely only sold locally. My particular copy did not leave the département of the Nièvre. It was sent on Friday 9 August 1963 from the village of Bona (at 8 kilometers south of Saint-Benin-des-Bois) to Pougues-les-Eaux, a small town about 33 kilometers away. There is no relation between the picture and the message on the back, which discusses a family visit on the coming Sunday, with the children and a grandmother who lives in Nevers. While their relation to ­Saint-Benin-des-Bois remains unclear, it is likely that both the sender and the receivers were from the Nièvre. When I read the message, I immediately wondered why they did not use the telephone. Were domestic telephones still an exception in the French countryside in those days? The answer to this question required further research. This may seem too far off the central object of cinema historiography, but it is important to understand how the cinema fitted in the broader media landscape as this helps us to define its distinctive role in breaking up rural isolation and bringing “the city” to “the country.” As it turns out, ­national statistics show that only 15 percent of all French households had a telephone in 1968. With the exception of Paris, where the percentage was 27 percent, it did not make much of a difference whether one lived in a rural or urban community. The percentage of households with private telephone connection ranged between 11 and 13 percent. In the Nièvre, 12 ­percent of the families could make a phone call at home. So, it is not surprising that postcards and letters were still an everyday communication medium. Let us look in more detail at the photograph. It shows the square in front of the church with the local café and an Antar gasoline service station. In the background, we can see the fields and the road to the next hamlet. We may assume that the café was the epicenter 128

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of social life in the village – outside the work sphere and the home. It is here that people would go for a drink, perhaps with some food, to buy cigarettes or the newspaper. Above the entrance is written “café tabac,” and the double-cone sign on the façade confirms that it is a state-approved tobacco sales point (similar compulsory red signs are still in use today). Using a magnifying loupe, I discovered that the publicity signs are not only for alcohol brands Suze and BYRRH but also for Pax soap. This suggests that the café tabac operated as a kind of convenience store. This combination was not unusual in rural France. In addition to the advertisements for consumer goods, there was a big bright yellow and green sign informing that Energol motor oil was sold on the premises. But what attracted me to the postcard in the first place is the partly washed-away n ­ otice on the wooden door on the extreme left of the picture. It is a handbill announcing the screening of the French musical comedy Boum sur Paris (1953, Maurice de Canonge). This ephemeral trace of rural film exhibition raises a number of questions about the material conditions in which the movie was viewed. When and where was the screening? Who ­organized it? Research in local archives and oral history interviews could help us to answer these questions, but let us consider the possibilities on the base of the existing knowledge of film culture in rural France.

Ambulant film exhibition Considering the size of the population of Saint-Benin-des-Bois and the surrounding villages, we can rule out the possibility that there was a permanent movie theater. The nearest cinemas were situated in Nevers (30 kilometers). To reach audiences in the surrounding countryside, they advertised their programs in the regional newspapers, not by way of handbills. If the screening of Boum sur Paris was in the summer, it might have been an open air show on the village’s central square in front of the municipal building, which housed the local administration and the public school. More likely the screening took place in a multifunctional space that belonged to the municipality, the church, or the café restaurant. Behind the wooden doors, there may have been a kind of makeshift auditorium. Since the early days of the cinematograph, ambulant film exhibitors had used ball rooms, parish halls, and other multifunctional venues. After the arrival of permanent movie theaters in cities and towns, such venues remained a stronghold of film exhibition in the countryside in many European countries. As a matter of fact, in France, rural people rarely went to a purpose-built movie theater when they went “au ciné” in their neighborhood. It is also possible that the handbill announced a screening somewhere in a village nearby. We know from oral histories that it was not usual in the countryside to walk up or bike several kilometers to see a film ( Jones, 2016; Marache, 2016). In the postwar era, more and more French people had access to motorized vehicles. The local gasoline station in Saint-Benin-des-Bois was part of a large national network of nearly 12,000 Antar service points. So, people may have gone by car or moped to see Boum sur Paris (1953) in Bona, for instance, which despite also being small, had two large café restaurants as it was situated on the main road from Nevers to Corbigny. Historians of European cinema have long overlooked the continued importance of ambulant film exhibition beyond the classical era of fairground tent shows. In the standard accounts, ambulant showmen disappear to the margins of commercial film exhibition sector during the 1910s, when more and more permanent movie theaters opened their doors. However, the growing body of work on rural film culture calls for a revision of this dominant narrative (Thissen and Zimmermann, 2016; Thissen, 2017). In the 1950s, hundreds of ambulant showmen were active in France. Each of them had an officially approved route of 129

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localities which they visited each week. Circuits of 150–250 kilometers were not uncommon. The smallest and more remote villages, like Saint-Benin-des-Bois, were served less frequently, once a month or only a few times in the year (which explains why the poster has been washed out by the weather). Social historian Corinne Marache (2016) interviewed a film exhibitor who toured the rural Gironde in the 1940s and 1950s with his projector, sound system, and films. On Mondays, he would pick up a new program in Bordeaux, where all the big distributors had an office. The remainder of the week he was on the road, initially traveling by bike and later by motorcycle. None of the villages and towns he visited on his weekly tour had a permanent cinema. The venues he used were plain halls that frequently lacked basic facilities like heating, a screen, and curtains to darken the room. This lack of comfort did not discourage people, mostly youngsters, from coming. Especially in the winter, when farm work slowed down and there were not so many fairs and festivals, rural people liked to go to the movies. Their time for leisure was still intimately bound up with the rhythms of agriculture. But the winter season had its own problems because bad weather conditions sometimes forced traveling exhibitors to cancel their show (Morenas, 1981; Marache, 2016).

Cinema history versus film history Scholars aligned with the new cinema history rarely analyze individual films. In fact, if there is anything that frames the field as “new” within film studies, it is the widespread dismissal of film analysis as a method to understand the relationship between the cinema and the public. The rationale is that cinema’s meaning is for most viewers defined by the social experience of going to the movies, rather than by the individual movies which they watched (Maltby, 2006: 85). However, as I have demonstrated elsewhere, in certain contexts, our understanding of that social meaning can greatly benefit from close readings of particular films. There is no room here for a textual analysis of Boum sur Paris, but already its title and story raise interesting questions in respect to the film’s reception by rural audiences (Figure 10.3). Boum sur Paris is not merely situated in the French capital, it features famous Parisian music hall stars like Édith Piaf, Juliette Gréco, Marcel Mouloudji, and Charles Trenet as well as celebrities from the world of cinema and television. We even get a glimpse of Hollywood stars Gregory Peck and Gary Cooper. The film is little more than a collection of songs linked by a flimsy storyline. Two bottles of the new perfume Boum have been given away as a prize for a charity raffle at the Moulin Rouge. One is given by mistake as it contains a highly secret new explosive, which has been developed in the perfume laboratory for the ministry of interior affairs (there is obviously a Cold War subtext). A young man and his fiancé try to recover the bottle. In their pursuit, they stop at several fairground attractions and music halls. Clearly, the only function of the narrative is to provide a setting for the cameo appearances of some thirty celebrities, including a dozen performances by famous chansonniers and big bands. Thus, the film replicates the format of 36 chandelles, a popular television variety show with stage performances recorded in Parisian music halls. This much-celebrated program was broadcast on French public television (RTF) twice a month from October 1952 onward and hosted by Jean Nohain, who plays himself in the film as host of the raffle at the ­Moulin Rouge. In many respects, Boum sur Paris was a sequel to the 1951 musical comedy Paris chante toujours (Paris Still Sings, Pierre Montazel) in which the protagonists follow a television crew that broadcasts a series of live concerts. Both films were cowritten by Roger Féral and Jacques Chabannes, who worked in film as well as television, and the sequel partly featured the same celebrities. 130

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Figures 10.3  Publicity poster for Boum sur Paris (1953)

Boum sur Paris gave audiences nationwide the opportunity to see the big names of French variété in their own neighborhood. Especially for fans of the legendary chansoniers of the postwar era, being able to watch their performance must have presented an added value by comparison to listening to the same artist on the radio or gramophone. When Boum sur Paris was produced in late 1953, television was not yet available outside Paris and Lille. We do not know when exactly the film was shown in Saint-Benin-des-Bois. French films usually reached the countryside within two years of their release in Paris and other major cities. Boum sur Paris came out in February 1954. The oldest posted copy of the postcard dates from 1958. By then, the number of television sets in France had reached one million (22 sets per 1,000 inhabitants), and the RTF had almost full national coverage. Television was becoming a mass medium but not for all French in the same way. Rural people lagged behind in their expenditure on consumer goods because they remained reluctant to buy on credit, and television sets were still very expensive. So even if the film was already a few years old when it came to their neighborhood, part of its appeal for viewers in Saint-Benin-des-Bois remained that they could watch Piaf and other music hall stars. 131

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There is, however, another star in the picture: Paris. The Eiffel Tower takes center stage in the official release posters. One of them also features other touristic icons: the Arc de Triomphe, the Sacré Coeur, the Place Vendôme column, and the obelisk at the Place de la Concorde. This publicity is somewhat misleading because we never get to see any of these monuments in the film, not even the Eiffel tower. Instead, we visit several famous cabarets and music halls and get a tour of the Kermesse aux étoiles, a popular Parisian amusement park. Paris is represented as the capital of entertainment and excitement – a highly attractive place to live. This one-sided representation has specific relevance for rural audiences. Twentieth-century France witnessed the mass migration out of rural regions and into urban areas. The figures for Saint-Benin-des-Bois are telling: in the first half of the century, its population declined by more than 50 percent. From a relatively large village (bourg) at the center of several hamlets, it was degrading into little more than a hamlet itself. And the exodus continued with the same pace during the “Glorious Thirty.” Against this backdrop, traditional forces in the countryside feared that the cinema encouraged young people in the countryside to leave for the city. Priests, parents, and youth organizations saw the popularity of the movies as a serious threat to the peasant way of life and the persistence of rural society. Already in the mid-1940s, the Catholic agricultural youth movement, for instance, repeatedly condemned the cinéma citadin (urban cinema) because its films idealized city life and misrepresented the peasant world as backward and traditional (Leventopoulos, 2016). They saw a connection between mainstream French cinema and the desire of rural youngsters to leave their homes in search for a “better” future. In other words, a part of the audience in Saint-Benin-des-Bois may well have watched Boum sur Paris with mixed feelings, enjoying the chansons of Piaf and other music hall stars, while at the same time resenting its promotion of metropolitan modernity.

Conclusion In line with Maltby’s original proposition, the central argument of this chapter has revolved around the idea that we need to look well beyond the confines of film exhibition and reception in order to better understand the place that the cinema occupied in the lives of its audiences. The experiment I undertook with the two postcards of Saint-Benin-des-Bois was to demonstrate how at a minimal level we can adopt a microanalytical approach to studying local film cultures without overlooking the wider vistas of social and media history. I hope that “Saint-Benin” will inspire other scholars to grapple with broad themes even when they investigate film culture through the prism of a distinctive local community – whether it is a hamlet, village, or city. I took my own inspiration from Italian microhistory, whose most prominent exponents never favored the micro as an article of faith, but always sought to combine micro- and macroscales (the worms and the cheese!). In the words of Francesca Trivellato (2011), they “wanted to say something big about history … to raise big questions about how social and cultural systems emerge and evolve.” In my view, such a commitment to the central concerns of the humanities and social sciences seems a more productive position than defining the essence of the new cinema history in terms of a rejection of film analysis. Hence, I took the opportunity with my small case study to open up alternative ways of thinking about the relation between cinema history and film history and explore the energizing possibility of their integration.

References Allen, R.C. and Gomery, D. (1985) Film History: Theory and Practice. New York, NY: Alfred A. Knopf. Biltereyst, D., Maltby, R., and Meers, Ph. (eds.) (2012) Cinema, Audiences and Modernity: New Perspectives on European Cinema History. London: Routledge.

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Cinema history as social history Biltereyst, D. and Meers, Ph. (2016) “New Cinema History and the Comparative Mode: Reflections on Comparing Historical Cinema Cultures.” Alphaville: Journal of Film and Screen Media, 11: 13–32. Dibbets, K. (1980) “Bioscoopketens in Nederland: Economische Concentratie en Geografische ­Spreiding van een Bedrijfstak, 1928–1977.” Amsterdam: Master thesis, Universiteit van Amsterdam. Forest, C. (1995) Les dernières Séances: Cent Ans d’Exploitation des Salles de Cinéma. Paris: CNRS Editions. Fuller-Seeley, K. (ed.) (2008) Hollywood in the Neighborhood: Historical Case Studies of Local Moviegoing. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Ginzburg, C. (2012) “Microhistory: Two or Three Things That I Know About It.” In C. ­Ginzburg (ed.) Threads and Traces: True False Fictive. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press (pp. 193–214). Jones, M. (2016) “Far from Swinging London: Memories of Non-Urban Cinemagoing in 1960s ­Britain.” In J. Thissen and C. Zimmermann (eds.) Cinema Beyond the City: Small-Town and Rural Film Culture in Europe. London: Palgrave/British Film Institute (pp. 117–129). Joyner, C. (2004) “From Here to There and Back Again.” In J.B. Boles (ed.) Shapers of Southern History: Autobiographical Reflections. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press (pp. 137–163). Leventopoulos, M. (2016) “Catholic Cinephilia in the Countryside: The Jeunesse Agricole Chrétienne and the Formation of Rural Audiences in 1950s France.” In J. Thissen and C. Zimmermann (eds.) Cinema Beyond the City: Small-Town and Rural Film Culture in Europe. London: Palgrave/British Film Institute (pp. 165–180). Maltby, R. (2006) “On the Prospect of Writing Cinema History from Below.” Tijdschrift voor ­M ediageschiedenis, 9(2): 74–96. Maltby R. (2007) “How Can Cinema History Matter More?” Screening the Past 22 http://tlweb.­latrobe. edu.au/humanities/screeningthepast/22/board-richard-maltby.html [Accessed 20 ­November 2018]. Maltby, R. (2011) “New Cinema Histories,” In R. Maltby, D. Biltereyst, and Ph. Meers (eds.) Explorations in New Cinema History: Approaches and Case Studies. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell (pp. 3–40). Maltby, R. Biltereyst, D., and Meers, Ph. (eds.) (2011) Explorations in New Cinema History: Approaches and Case Studies. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell. Marache, C. (2016) “Cinema and Social Life in the Rural Gironde: Insights from an Oral History Project.” In J. Thissen and C. Zimmermann (eds.) Cinema Beyond the City: Small-Town and Rural Film Culture in Europe. London: Palgrave/British Film Institute (pp. 105–116). Mendras, H. (1988) La Seconde Révolution Française. Paris: Galimard. Morenas, F. (1981) Le cinéma ambulant en Provence. Lyon: Presses Universitaires de Lyon. Peiss, K. (1986) Cheap Amusements: Working Women and Leisure in Turn-of-the-Century New York. ­Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press. Rosenzweig, R. (1983) Eight Hours for What We Will: Workers & Leisure in an Industrial City, 1870–1920. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press. Thissen, J. (2013) “Understanding Dutch Film Culture: A Comparative Approach.” Alphaville Journal of Film and Screen Media, 6. http://www.alphavillejournal.com/Issue6/HTML/ArticleThissen.html [Accessed 20 November 2018]. Thissen, J. (2016), “Film Consumers in the Country: The Business and Culture of Cinemagoing in the Netherlands.” In J. Thissen and C. Zimmermann (eds.) Cinema Beyond the City: Small-Town and Rural Film Culture in Europe. London: Palgrave/British Film Institute (pp. 87–104). Thissen, J. (2017) “Multifunctional Halls and the Place of Cinema in the European Countryside, 1920–1970.” CiNéMAS. Revue d’études cinématographiques/Journal of Film Studies, 27(2–3): 91–111. Thissen, J. and Zimmermann, C. (eds.) (2016) Cinema Beyond the City: Small-Town and Rural Film ­Culture in Europe. London: Palgrave/British Film Institute. Thompson, E.P. (1963/revised 1968) The Making of the English Working Class. London: Penguin Classics. Tilly, C. (1984) Big Structures, Large Processes, Huge Comparisons. New York, NY: Russell Sage Foundation. Trivellato, F. (2011) “Is There a Future for Italian Microhistory in the Age of Global History?” ­California Italian Studies, 2(1). Retrieved from: http://escholarship.org/uc/item/0z94n9hq ­[Accessed 20 November 2018].

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Part III

Distribution and trade

Introduction While the majority of the work that has identified itself as new cinema history has concerned itself with the history of audiences and the social experience of cinema, an important strand has examined the industrial history of film distribution and exhibition. Although distribution has been the sector of the cinema system least examined by film scholars, it was and remains the means by which the American film industry has exercised its hegemonic power in both its domestic and international markets. As the point of connection between manufacture and retail, distributors simultaneously controlled both exhibitors’ – and therefore audiences’ – access to films and producers’ access to exhibition venues and audiences. Distribution was the sector of the cinema system in which cinema was at its most material: in both production and exhibition, films were individuated as creation and as experience, but in distribution, they became just product, celluloid articles of commerce in identical, interchangeable cans. Distributors’ contracts also controlled the allocation of revenue, and therefore profit, to each of the industry’s sectors. The chapters in this part demonstrate that the digitization of primary historical sources has made as great a difference to researchers’ capacity to write histories of distribution as is the case for histories of exhibition, allowing us to explore the relationship between the business history of cinema and its social history. Martin Loiperdinger’s chapter demonstrates the use of trade papers, fan magazines, and newspapers in researching the emergence of the star system, and the global promotion of early stars in the 1910s. Access to these sources reveals the extent to which local newspapers across the world advertised screenings and publicized the performances of such European stars as Asta Nielsen, Valdemar Psilander, and Henny Porten, as well as now more familiar American actors. As more newspapers in more countries become available in digitized form, the extent of cinema’s early global distribution becomes more visible to historians, and Loiperdinger’s chapter details the way in which, through their integration in a searchable database, cinema advertisements can be used to study the interplay between local exhibition and the global circulation of star brands. As with histories of exhibition, scholars’ use of common data standards and protocols to ensure interoperability will enable comparative analysis across regional, national, and continental boundaries possible as each local history contributes to a more complex understanding of what Karel Dibbets has called “the infrastructure of cultural life.”

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Cinema’s foreign and diplomatic relations have frequently been fraught, more often over terms of trade than over film content. In the aftermath of the Second World War, most ­European countries sought to protect their domestic production industries from ­Hollywood’s incursions through taxation or quota legislation, while the major American companies ­created the Motion Picture Export Association (MPEA), Hollywood’s “Little State Department,” to aggressively pursue their interests abroad. Clara Pafort-Overduin and Douglas Gomery describe the conflict between the MPEA and the Netherlands Cinema A ­ ssociation of distributors and exhibitors, which exercised effective control over access to the Dutch market. In addition to analyzing the origins and course of the conflict, Pafort-Overduin and Gomery focus on its effects on what was available for screening in Dutch cinemas, and the extent to which the MPEA’s decision to withhold supply and the Dutch distributors’ boycott affected movie audiences’ choices and attendance for the duration of the dispute. In the next chapter, Richard Maltby examines the debates during the 1930s about the exhibition practices of continuous performance and double billing. Many US theaters did not advertise the starting times of their screenings, arguing that moviegoers preferred to schedule their attendance according to habit, meal times, transport timetables, or the other rhythms of their daily lives, regardless of where in the show they came in. Responding to declining Depression audiences’ demands for bargains in their entertainment, the inclusion of two features in a theater’s programming became widespread in all tiers of the exhibition system, increasing the length of the show and largely eliminating live entertainment. While few in the industry supported double features, the practice was regarded as a necessary evil despite its detrimental effect on picture quality and repeated surveys reporting audiences’ preference for single features in a balanced program. Maltby argues that continuous performance programming allowed audiences to ignore the disciplines of narrative by simply entering and leaving the theater as they chose. But by the late 1930s, double features had created a vicious cycle in which the production volumes it required eroded product quality, which, in turn, maintained audience demand for quantity. Like Maltby’s contribution, Zoë Wallin’s chapter is based on a close examination of trade press discussions of distribution and exhibition practices and indicates the extent to which these sources can illuminate the relationship between the patterns in which films were circulated and the social experience of cinema. Wallin focuses on the early 1960s when, following the Supreme Court’s ruling in the Paramount suit, the run-zone-clearance system of distribution established by the major companies had disintegrated. She describes the introduction of the “showcase” system of release, in which films were simultaneously released into a few suburban and neighborhood theaters rather than being premiered in a first-run city center cinema. Responding to demographic shifts as well as industry conditions, the “showcase” strategy promised distributors cheaper advertising costs and a faster return of revenues, while maintaining their collaborative relationships with the large theater circuits and their market control. For audiences, “showcase” meant that a smaller number of theaters played longer runs of a film, limiting the number of films available to moviegoers in a local market. ­ erhoeven, The final chapter in this section, by Dean Brandum, Bronwyn Coate, and Deb V uses a microeconomic approach to explore the commercial success of individual films in different theaters. Exploring the fortunes of British films released in Chicago in the 1960s, they demonstrate that a film’s box office performance at a particular venue could differ markedly from its nationally aggregated box office receipts and suggest that the commercial failure of British films in the United States in the late 1960s was in part due to their being exhibited in unsuitable theaters where they were unlikely to draw an audience. The authors use a relative measure of commercial success, comparing the box office performance of a film at 136

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each theater in their sample to that theater’s median weekly gross, providing an exhibitor’s perspective on each film’s performance. Using the “Picture Grosses” section of Variety for their data, their difference from weekly average (DWA) method provides a means of exploring box office data that could be applied across a wide range of film types and periods and a potential source of insights into the specific features of local markets and audience tastes in the United States and elsewhere.

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11 Early film stars in trade journals and newspapers Data-based research on global distribution and local exhibition Martin Loiperdinger In his Menus for Movieland, Richard Abel describes the local newspaper as “a treasure trove of discursive material on the promotion, exhibition and reception of the movies, material that still remains relatively unexamined” (2015: 2). Indeed, for over a hundred years, from the 1890s until the late 2000s when online information service on local entertainments became predominant, local newspapers were cinemagoers’ main source of information on film screenings. The daily press worked as the interface between local audiences and local cinemas: advertisements taken out by cinema owners provided readers with useful information on film programs and from around 1913 film criticism lent a helpful hand in deciding which films to view, while background articles mirrored public debates on cinema-related questions. The continuing digitization of trade papers, fan magazines, and local newspapers opens promising perspectives for scholarly research on historical audiences through the collection and analysis of advertisements and articles of all sorts of films. This chapter describes data-based research on the making of early film stars during the 1910s, a period which is essential for understanding the emergence of the star system. Research into this formative period is revealing not only for explaining the star phenomenon but also for examining the long-lasting partnerships between cinemas and local newspapers which became crucial to the promotion of early film stars. This chapter explores how historical research in digitized trade and local papers can be combined with the construction of special interest databases in order to collect and analyze the material used to promote early film stars in both international distribution and local exhibition. After a brief discussion of the interaction between cinema enterprises and the local press before the First World War, the chapter describes innovative methods of historiographical research that use database construction to stimulate and support comparative efforts in new cinema history. Collecting and compiling promotional content from the international trade and local press not only promises to compensate for the lack of surviving business papers but also reveals the ubiquitous “glocal” appearances of early film stars on thousands of local cinema screens dispersed over the globe. The chapter concludes with a discussion of Asta Nielsen, the first international film star of the long-feature film format, and the Importing Asta Nielsen Database (IANDb), the only database currently devoted to an early film star of the 1910s. 138

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Local newspaper advertisements and the emergence of the film star before the First World War From its beginnings with the Cinématographe Lumière, commercial cinema combined global distribution of 35 mm celluloid strips called “films” with local screenings of moving pictures which were projected from those strips. Before the First World War, most films were distributed and screened all over Europe and North America, in Latin America, Australasia, and parts of Asia and Africa. While a hundred or more copies of each of these short films often circulated around the globe, all their screenings took place within a local environment of live performances by musicians and lecturers, for a local audience, and framed by the local circumstances of venue; censorship; advertising; and the class, age, and gender of the audience. Film screenings performed by traveling showmen at fairgrounds or in town halls were advertised in the local press and announced and promoted by posters, handbills, and barkers. From 1906 onward, fixed-site cinemas were established in nearly all cities and most towns in the industrialized regions in Europe and North America. Cinema advertisements then became routine in the local press (Moore, 2011). Addressing local people who could afford a daily newspaper, they were usually published on a regular schedule and placed on pages announcing other local entertainments provided by legitimate theaters, variety theaters, music halls, ballrooms, roller skate rings, panoramas, lantern lectures, and open air concerts. Between 1910 and 1914, cinema advertisements in the local press gained importance as exhibition shifted from the variety of short film programs to the long-feature film format that favored the promotion of actors in leading roles. This fundamental change started in Denmark in 1910, when a few two- and three-reel dramas achieved long runs of several weeks in Danish cinemas, among them Afgrunden (The Abyss), with an unknown theater actress called Asta Nielsen. In Germany, The Abyss was the first feature monopolfilm, using a distribution system that gave exclusive exhibition rights to one cinema owner in a town or district. Remarkably, large cinema advertisements in local newspapers in Germany drew readers’ attention to the new and exclusive attraction of a long theatrical play to be seen on local cinema screens (Loiperdinger, 2012: 145–148). The tremendous box office success of The Abyss in Germany paved the way for Nielsen’s international career as the first film star of the long-feature film format. By 1908, actors who played standard characters in short westerns or comedies, such as Essanay’s Broncho Billy or Pathé’s Max, had become world-famous film stars, but they did not dominate the whole film program because their appearances on screen were limited to just one out of eight, ten, or more short films. Gilbert M. Anderson and Max Linder were only known under their character’s name, whereas Nielsen was launched as a trademark: in the 1911/1912, 1912/1913, and 1913/1914 seasons, three exclusive “Asta Nielsen series,” each comprising seven or eight long features of about 1,000 meters (one hour of playing time) in length, made her a prominent brand of cinema entertainment in many countries ­( Loiperdinger and Jung, 2013). Other big names also became standard in film marketing: advertisements named famous script writers Gabriele D’Annunzio or Nobel Prize winner Gerhart Hauptmann; celebrated theater actors Herbert Beerbohm Tree, Sarah Bernhardt, and Albert Bassermann; and internationally famous dancers Stacia Napierkowska, Polaire, and Saharet. Film stars became company brands: Pathé’s Suzanne Grandais and Nordisk’s Valdemar Psilander, while Nielsen was marketed as a brand of her own. The German film market took the lead in the making of film stars within the exclusive distribution system. For the 1912/1913 season, just one year after Asta Nielsen’s monopolfilm series debut, ­exclusive feature series were released with the couple Wanda Treumann and Viggo Larsen, and with 139

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an unknown young actress called Lissi Nebuschka, and in the 1913/1914 season, Nielsen’s rival Henny Porten started her first monopolfilm series. In the graphic design of cinema advertisements in local newspapers, the names of such early film stars were enlarged as visible catchwords, reflecting the growing impact of stars on cinema attendance. While the local press was helpful in establishing sustainable relations of local audiences with film stars branded in advertisements, local cinemas became regular sources of newspapers’ income by promoting “guest performances” of film stars appearing on their screens.

Global distribution and local screenings: data-based research on early film stars In tracing the fundamental change from short film programs to long-feature films, cinema historians have to date largely focused on the trade press. Trade papers reflect the national marketing strategies of film producers and distributors and exhibitors’ responses to those strategies. Corinna Müller (1994) and others have researched the transition of the German film market from short film programs to the exclusive monopolfilm system through meticulous analyses of the trade press, revealing the extent to which German film producers and distributors were crucial trend setters in being the first to export exclusive long-feature films to important foreign markets such as Great Britain (Burrows, 2013). Film and cinema historians have also examined the local press for case studies on cinema buildings and enterprises and information on film programming, live performance, and audience attendance. These microhistorical approaches to cinema history analyze local newspapers as sources for local histories (e.g. Hammond, 2006; Fuller-Seeley, 2008). Historical research on the emergence of the star system which explores the global distribution and worldwide exhibition of long-feature films must also take the global aspects of local screenings into account: early film stars appeared on screens all over the world at the same time, and local audiences were very much aware of their favorites’ worldwide ubiquity. Asta Nielsen once claimed that while acting on the set, she was imagining audiences of hundreds of thousands, from all nations and classes (Nielsen, 1913: 6). By a rough estimate, she could indeed have been watched on screen by hundreds of thousands of viewers on the same evening, thanks to technical reproduction and the efficient global distribution of at least some seventy and in some cases more than a hundred copies of each of her films in the “Asta Nielsen series.” Research in star studies still has to fully recognize the multiplicity and ubiquity of early film stars such as Nielsen or Psilander, who could make simultaneous appearances on screens in many cities and towns scattered around the globe, and who circulated all over the world as branded commodities, generating fan communities in many countries within different social and cultural milieus. From a perspective that considers both the global distribution and the local exhibition of stars, advertisements for long-feature film stars in local newspapers become “glocal” in multiple respects. The glocality of local cinema advertisements can be strikingly revealed by transferring them from the day and page of publication in the local newspaper into other contexts: beyond their placement in relation to graphic design, content, time, and space, inside the local newspaper on a given page, cinema advertisements can be examined in regional, national, or global contexts. This can easily be done within a star-related international database that makes local advertisements searchable according to terms such as film titles, cities, and countries of announced screenings, newspaper or journal titles, or just language. In addition to those spatial parameters for building sequences of advertisements, chronological parameters may be defined, exploring the exhibition of a film or film series, or the publicity for an actress or actor, 140

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director, or scriptwriter, in a selected season, month, week, or day. An international database of advertisements related to a film star also allows for comparisons between several single films in different cities or countries, by building sequences of such advertisements in chronological order. It should also be possible to search for common descriptions of a star, such as “the German Bernhardt” for Asta Nielsen, and to search for other stars who were exhibited in double-feature programs together with Nielsen films. Last but not least, local exhibition of silent films was accompanied by live performances of musicians or even orchestras and often also by film narrators or lecturers: cinema advertisements sometimes name conductors and even composers of pieces from the musical score. Collecting such performance-related information from local advertisements in a database provides essential information for the study of local modes of watching a film star who represents a global brand of cinema entertainment.

Star studies bottom-up: how to collect and analyze cinema advertisements in the local press With a few exceptions, such as the Dutch film distributor and cinema entrepreneur Jean Desmet (Blom, 2003) or the Danish production company Nordisk Film (Thorsen, 2017), the business correspondence of European film manufacturers, distributors, and exhibitors of the early period are lost or inaccessible. Because of the lack of direct sources from company archives, advertisements and promotional texts scattered in trade journals and local newspapers are the main sources of facts and figures about long-feature film circulation and local exhibition. In the transitional period of the early 1910s, the many thousands of daily newspapers worldwide are a treasure trove containing myriads of tiny pieces of information to reconstruct the emergence and presentation of early film stars. While this sounds like looking for needles in a haystack, the increasing number of digitized newspapers offers quite easily accessible search options: optical character recognition (OCR) and full-text search functions allow researchers to just type in what they are looking for, press the search button, and invisible hands behind the surface of the computer screen do the rest. The readability of names, however, depends on the graphic qualities of newspaper prints, the recognition capacity of the OCR software, and the correct spelling of names: Australasian newspapers, for example, often misspelled Nielsen as Neilson, Nielson, or simply Nilsen (Bottomore, 2013: 310). OCR will also often not recognize the graphic design of names in cinema advertisements. Experience searching for the name Asta Nielsen and its variants in Austrian Newspapers Online and the Australian website Trove suggests that OCR-based searches usually catch only 30–50 percent of the articles, promotional texts, and cinema advertisements which mention her. In the process of analyzing cinema advertisements and promotional texts in local newspapers, film and cinema historians should always keep in mind that these items are historical sources. They were not printed for today’s historians. On a certain day, more than a century ago, they addressed local readers interested in leisure time activities such as cinemagoing, offering them news about film dramas with stars who guaranteed high values of uplifting entertainment in a local cinema, comparable to first-class legitimate theaters. Readers looking for an evening’s entertainment also received information on more practical matters such as the venues of film screenings, running times, and additional content of film programs. Sometimes, promotion was masked as practical advice, such as when advance booking was recommended due to “overwhelming demand.” While local readers kept cinema advertisements in local newspapers strictly bound to the local context of cinemagoing, these advertisements can be used for a wide range of research perspectives, today. The size of letters forming the film star’s name compared to the size of 141

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the film title reveals changing hierarchies of status between the film star and her or his various long-feature films. Adverts for a film title in several cinemas of the same town or city at the same day may suggest the presence of two or more copies of the same film which means that renting this film was not restricted – or, in the case of a monopolfilm distributed in the exclusive system, those adverts may imply the “bicycling” of reels between cinema buildings in order to screen one print in more than one venue. Compared with the date of the first release of a long-feature film, the schedule of local screenings can reveal time lags that may indicate the local, regional, or national currency of a star in different countries, as well as the time taken in transporting film reels.

Asta Nielsen’s “glocal” stardom according to the IANDb The IANDb has been a work in progress since 2013 and is the only database of printed advertisements devoted to an international film star of the 1910s. Its fifth edition (as of S­ eptember 2017) includes more than 4,000 cinema advertisements, promotional texts, and articles from local newspapers and trade papers related to the distribution and exhibition of all the 27 long-feature films starring Asta Nielsen released before the First World War, ­collected from more than twenty countries.1 IANDb started with advertisements and promotional texts collected from German, British, and US American trade journals, and from local ­newspapers in Berlin, Metz, Innsbruck, Barcelona, Warsaw, Reykjavík, and the N ­ etherlands Indies, all related to articles published in the proceedings of the conference Importing Asta Nielsen (Loiperdinger and Jung, 2013). Providing access to cinema advertisements and promotional texts to which authors refer in their articles has allowed the sharing of sources between ­authors and readers, exceeding by far the small number of illustrations which can be printed in books. Meanwhile, around 3,000 more items have been collected by students at the University of Trier from Austro-Hungarian and Russian trade journals, from Copenhagen and ­A arhus in Denmark; Trier, Freiburg, Fulda, Darmstadt, Saarbrücken, Strasbourg, and ­K arlsruhe in Germany; Vienna, Budapest, Prague, Graz, Salzburg, Teplitz-Schönau, Lviv, and Znaim in Austria-Hungary; Łód ź in Russia; Sydney, Melbourne, Kalgoorlie, Broken Hill, and Kadina in Australia; and also from Sheffield, Madrid, and Rio de Janeiro. When there is no funding available for systematic research, students’ research in university seminars can be fundamental for “crowd-building” projects such as IANDb. Collecting thousands of items from the trade and local press is not an end in itself, but it can help to answer some fundamental questions referring to the innovative business model of the three “Asta Nielsen series” that was crucial for Nielsen’s career, for the emergent star system and for the transition from short film programs to the long-feature film format before the First World War: the three series combined the international brand marketing of the film star with the exclusive “blind” booking of long-feature film series. The contract signed by director Urban Gad and Asta Nielsen in May 1911 to script and shoot thirty films within a period of three years must be considered lost, but important information about capital investments and return calculations can be drawn from the trade press. In respect to the first of the three “Asta Nielsen series” in the 1911/1912 season, film business men from Berlin, Cologne, Frankfurt, and Vienna expected to earn 1,400,000 marks from an investment of 700,000 marks in the production of ten long-feature films and the distribution of about seventy copies of each film. Nearly half of the seventy copies were bound for the home markets of Germany and Austria-Hungary, to recoup the investment, while the other half went into international distribution to earn net profit (Loiperdinger, 2013: 97–100). Recouping investments on the home market and taking all income from distribution abroad as net profit has also been the 142

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business model of the Hollywood majors for decades. It would be highly instructive to know how this business model worked in the competitive world of national and local film markets, in the years before Hollywood became the driving force of the international film trade. Conclusions from the 4,000 promotional items in the database can only be roughly sketched here. As film programs rented by local cinema owners depended on distributors’ supply of regional and national film markets, the trade press is most helpful in understanding further research results on local film exhibition. In Germany, the business model of the three “Asta Nielsen series” was fully put into practice in Berlin, where the vertical structure of producer–distributor–exhibitor was already established by the Union-Theater cinema chain. Berlin’s growing number of Union-Theater cinemas (six in autumn 1911 and nine in spring 1914) showed all the films in the three “Asta Nielsen series” for a full week of seven days in their first week in circulation (cf. IANDb, Union-Theater-Zeitung). Apart from the special case of Berlin, however, the information about the series’ exhibition is quite divergent. In Strasbourg and Prague, nearly all the films of the three series were screened for a full week each. The Edison-Theater in Graz also followed this routine for the first two seasons but only screened four of the eight films in the third series in 1913/1914. By contrast, cinema patrons in Freiburg could watch only four of the eight films in the first series in 1911/1912 but could see the complete second and third series. In Innsbruck, two or three of the films of each series were missing, while audiences in Metz had access to 21 of the 23 films in the three series. Cinema owners in Metz, Freiburg, and Innsbruck ran the films for three or four days, including the weekend, rather than for a full week. The full week’s rental design of the exclusive monopolfilm system thus turned out to be counter to the practice of twice-weekly program changes of short film programs, which was still predominant in film exhibition before the First World War. The other copies of each film were distributed to foreign film markets. Distributors who had bought the exclusive rights for a certain region or country took out advertisements in the national trade papers of many European countries within the first two months of the 1911/1912 season. The Russian trade journal Sine-Fono published promotional material for all 23 films of the three series and even carried announcements of a fourth series for the 1914/1915 season, which was stopped by the beginning of the First World War. It seems that the distribution company Tanagra bought exclusive rights for the Russian Empire in order to sell them to other distributors for regional distribution (IANDb, Sine-Fono). In some foreign markets, especially in the British Empire and the United States, distributors offered varying versions of “Asta Nielsen series.” Walturdaw, the oldest film distribution company in Britain, composed its first exclusive long-feature series as a collection including the German film drama Fools of Society (Sündige Liebe), Asta Nielsen’s single film Retribution (Nachtfalter), five films of the first Asta Nielsen ­series, and the British feature The Ghost of the Past. Walturdaw’s advertisements did not mention Asta Nielsen by name until January 1912, and the exclusive series was called an “Asta Nielsen series” only in May 1912 (cf. IANDb #106, #130). For the 1912/1913 season, ­Walturdaw added Nielsen’s single films The Abyss and Heißes Blut (Hypnotised) to the eight films of the second “Asta Nielsen series,” but for the 1913/1914 season, the company offered only three out of the seven features (cf. IANDb, trade press, London). Walturdaw’s ambitions to sell Asta Nielsen films in the United States initially succeeded when Carl Laemmle’s IMP bought The Abyss but failed as Tournament Film in Toledo, Ohio, the small distribution company which had bought six Asta Nielsen films soon went bankrupt. From December 1913 to April 1914, Pathé released seven Asta Nielsen films in the United States, but their promotion did not mention her at all. By the 1913/1914 season, it was apparently already too 143

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late to establish an early film star from Europe in the United States (cf. IANDb, trade press, United States; Abel, 2013). In several countries, including Spain, the exclusive system of film distribution either did not work very well or not at all (cf. IANDb, Barcelona; Paz and Montero, 2013). Apart from the exceptional case of the US market, however, Asta Nielsen was a well-known brand name in the cinema entertainment of many countries, where more than half of the 23 films of the three series were available for screening. The versatility of Nielsen’s screen characters, targeted at middle-class audiences accustomed to attending the theater, helped support the efforts of the film industry to switch from short film programs to the screen entertainment of the long-feature film which could be advertised as “art” and as “legitimate” recreation, at least for adult patrons. Advertisements taken out for Asta Nielsen films by cinema owners in local newspapers were crucial in the emergence of the early film star. They show a wide variety in their size, design, content, and functions; advertisements could appear in advance of a film’s run, at its opening, during the run and as a final reminder before it closed. Many cinemas followed quite sophisticated rules in promoting early film stars, in Germany and Austria-Hungary as well as in Australia where newspapers limited graphic design to the repetition of characters. Most Australian cinema chains created visually impressive advertisements by simply compiling columns and words in different fonts and sizes for the names of early film stars (cf. IANDb, Australia). Distributors in the Russian Empire were highly creative in designing their advertisements in art nouveau or constructivist style (cf. IANDb, Sine-Fono). Apart from their artistic qualities, the design of cinema advertisements provides visual indications about the rank and status of early film stars. The relative sizes of the star’s name and the film title reveal quite clearly whether the star or the promoted film was considered the attraction of the program. Advertisements for films of the first “Asta Nielsen series” show different options: some cinema owners follow the distributor’s advice by focusing on the innovation of the film star; some are reluctant to do so and consequently hide the star beneath much larger characters of the film title. While many advertisements label Nielsen as the “Duse of cinema art,” the “Danish Bernhardt,” or just the “great tragic actress,” others focus on the “great sensation” of the film. Sometimes, newspaper advertisements allude to local competition between cinemas. This becomes explicit, for example, when patrons were warned of competing cinemas which were accused of deceptively advertising the films of Swedish actress Ida Nielsen as “Nielsen films” (cf. IANDb, Ida Nielsen). In the context of local competition with other entertainment options, the live performance aspects of film screenings were sometimes mentioned by naming musicians, conductors, composers, or lecturers. Not surprisingly, information on musical scores and orchestras accompanying Asta Nielsen films was appreciated in Vienna (cf. IANDb, local press, Vienna). More remarkably, local conductors and orchestras are usually mentioned and often praised in promotional items for film screenings in a mining district in Australia (cf. IANDb, Kalgoorlie).

Conclusion: research perspectives in early stardom The content and search functions of the IANDb were designed to afford diverse opportunities for studying and researching Nielsen’s early international career: IANDb provides an expanding diversity of advertising practices which make it possible to identify similarities and differences in promotion and exhibition practices between countries, cities and small towns, industrial and rural regions, and between different cultural milieus according to ethnical, religious, or political affiliations. 144

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Inevitably, an even more considerable number of promotional pieces must be added to arrive at thorough empirical evaluations of the “Asta Nielsen series” business model. Referring to the home markets of Germany and Austria-Hungary, systematic searches should be undertaken for advertisements and promotional texts in the newspapers of some fifty cities and towns, carefully selected according to the size of population, geographical position, and social milieu. Case studies on the small film markets of Australia, New Zealand, and the Netherlands offer promising options, thanks to the tremendous progress made in digitizing these countries’ local newspapers, making it possible to map the distribution of single films and even, in Australasia, single copies of a film. Further research in yet other countries will depend on the work of scholars interested in pursuing empirical research on early film stars. Students can do valuable research in collecting and analyzing adverts and promotional texts in the “treasure trove” of the thousands of local newspapers published in the years before the First World War. Any substantial progress in enlarging IANDb depends on international collaboration among scholars who are interested in the “glocal” emergence of early film stars. IANDb structures research interests in analyzing Asta Nielsen’s rise to international stardom under the conditions of a specific mode of international film trade at a specific period of time. It can, however, also serve as a model for yet other star studies of different kinds of stars. It could, for example, provide a deeper insight into the making of the worldwide fame of Charles Chaplin under the mercantile conditions of the First World War. Probably, only minor structural changes in the setup of a respective database would yield outstanding results for research into his “glocal” eminence as a film star.

Note 1 http://importing-asta-nielsen.deutsches-filminstitut.de/ [Accessed 20 November 2018].

References Abel, R. (2013) “Asta Nielsen’s Flickering Stardom in the USA, 1912–1914.” In M. Loiperdinger and U. Jung (eds.) Importing Asta Nielsen. The International Film Star in the Making 1910–1914. New Barnet: John Libbey (pp. 279–288). Abel, R. (2015) Menus for Movieland. Newspapers and the Emergence of American Film Culture 1913–1916. Oakland, CA: University of California Press. Blom, I. (2003) Jean Desmet and the Early Dutch Film Trade. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Bottomore, S. (2013) “‘The Great Favorite, Miss Asta Neilson.’ Asta Nielsen on Australasian Screens.” In M. Loiperdinger and U. Jung (eds.) Importing Asta Nielsen. The International Film Star in the Making 1910–1914. New Barnet: John Libbey (pp. 309–320). Burrows, J. (2013) “‘The Great Asta Nielsen,’ ‘The Shady Exclusive’ and the Birth of Film Censorship in Britain, 1911–1914.” In M. Loiperdinger and U. Jung (eds.) Importing Asta Nielsen. The International Film Star in the Making 1910–1914. New Barnet: John Libbey (pp. 203–213). Fuller-Seeley, K.H. (ed.) (2008) Hollywood in the Neighborhood. Historical Case Studies of Local Moviegoing. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Hammond, M. (2006) The Big Show. British Cinema Culture in the Great War 1914–1918. Exeter: University of Exeter Press. Loiperdinger, M. (2012) “Afgrunden in Germany: Monopolfilm, Cinemagoing and the Emergence of the Film star Asta Nielsen, 1910–11.” In D. Biltereyst, R. Maltby, and Ph. Meers (eds.) Cinema, Audiences and Modernity. New Perspectives on European Cinema History. London: Routledge (pp. 142–153). Loiperdinger, M. (2013) “‘Die Duse der Kino-Kunst’: Asta Nielsen’s Berlin Made Brand.” In M. Loiperdinger and U. Jung (eds.) Importing Asta Nielsen. The International Film Star in the Making 1910–1914. New Barnet: John Libbey (pp. 93–112). Loiperdinger, M. and Jung, U. (eds.) (2013) Importing Asta Nielsen. The International Film Star in the Making 1910–1914 (KINtop Studies in Early Cinema 2). New Barnet: John Libbey.

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Martin Loiperdinger Moore, P. (2011) “The Social Biograph: Newspapers as Archives of the Regional Mass Market for Movies.” In R. Maltby, D. Biltereyst, and Ph. Meers (eds.) Explorations in New Cinema History. Malden, MA: Blackwell (pp. 263–279). Müller, C. (1994) Frühe deutsche Kinematographie. Formale, wirtschaftliche und kulturelle Entwicklungen. Stuttgart and Weimar: J. B. Metzler. Nielsen, A. (1913) “Bei Asta Nielsen: Ein Gespräch mit der Künstlerin.” Kinematographische Rundschau 260 (2 March 1913), Asta Nielsen Nummer (insert) (pp. 4–6). Paz, M.A. and Montero, J. (2013) “‘Celebrada artista de fama mundial’: Asta Nielsen in Barcelona, 1910–1914.” In M. Loiperdinger and U. Jung (eds.) Importing Asta Nielsen. The International Film Star in the Making 1910–1914. New Barnet: John Libbey (pp. 187–199). Thorsen, I. (2017) Nordisk Films Compagni 1906–1914: The Rise and Fall of the Polar Bear (KINtop Studies in Early Cinema 5). New Barnet: John Libbey.

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12 The high stakes conflict between the Motion Picture Export Association and the Netherlands Cinema Association, 1945–19461 Clara Pafort-Overduin and Douglas Gomery In this chapter we analyze a trade conflict between the USA and the Netherlands that commenced directly after the Second World War. Two national organizations, the M ­ otion Picture Export Association (hereafter MPEA) and the Netherlands Cinema Association (hereafter NBB, or Nederlandse Bioscoop Bond), clashed over differing interests. At stake was the Dutch cinema market, which had operated openly before the war when it came to the i­mportation of foreign films (domestic production had always been negligible) but had been protective and closed when it came to allowing foreign companies to buy or establish theaters. The closed market had long been a concern for American distributors and exhibitors, and after the war, the MPEA tried to crack the Dutch market. The Dutch were not, however, willing to simply let the MPEA have its way, and the ensuing conflict led to mutual boycotts. In this case study we contribute to the body of work on the MPEA’s endeavors to expand its businesses in Europe after the Second World War. These studies focus on the intertwining of economic and political powers and analyze how Hollywood, with the help of the ­A merican government, tried to gain access to foreign markets with as few hindrances as possible (­Greenwald, 1952; Guback, 1969, 1986; Jarvie, 1983, 1986; Segrave, 1997; ­León-­Aguinaga, 2009; Treveri Gennari, 2009). The contest between a national institution and the MPEA is also the subject of this chapter, but we add an extra layer to the analysis by taking into account the effect of the resulting boycotts on what was actually shown in Dutch theaters. This offers insights into how the NBB withstood the MPEA’s pressure as well as the way that audience choices were affected. This chapter focuses principally on the Dutch side and combines an institutional analysis and an examination of data on film exhibition after the war. This allows us to examine the institutional contexts of national laws and international treaties in which both organizations functioned, the structure, policies and internal discussions of both organizations, and the effects of the conflict on the actual cinema programs in the Netherlands. It also allows us to demonstrate how top-down powers met with bottom-up resistance on two levels. 147

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First, we consider the dispute between the MPEA and the NBB at the national level. Then we examine the impact of the conflict on the local level by analyzing information on Dutch cinemas’ programming, before, during and after the conflict, focusing on the extent to which ­A merican films from MPEA members were shown during this time. From the standpoint of the MPEA we have used the statements it gave to American trade journals and the press. For the NBB we have used their trade journal, the minutes of the meetings of the main board, the board of the distributors’ department, and the general meetings of the distributors’ department. In addition, we have had access to the correspondence of the Dutch State Department regarding the conflict, and we have compared this source with the minutes of the NBB. Programming information has been gathered from advertisements in local newspapers.

Creation of the MPEA The Motion Picture Producers and Distributors Association of America (MPPDA) was established in 1922 to protect and pursue the interests of the American film industry at home and abroad. In September 1945, Eric Johnston succeeded Will Hays and was tasked with boosting the revenues for Hollywood films around the world. Johnston had the perfect background and experience for this position. As president of the United States Chamber of Commerce since April 1942 (Washington Post, 1 May 1942: 7; Spokane Daily Chronicle, 1 May 1942: 1), Johnston had traveled to many foreign countries for the Chamber, meeting with political leaders to design new trade treaties favorable to the USA.2 He had proven to be a pragmatic leader and independent thinker, pointing out what would be in the best interests of all parties while always keeping the interests of the USA as a prime concern. He was convinced that the USA would and should play a leading role in the world. In a 1943 speech titled “The Road to Realism,” he declared that A strong, prosperous and, above all, free United States is essential to the health and peace of the entire world. … It is fashionable nowadays to speak the language of philanthropy. But I prefer to speak the language of enlightened self-interest. … Whether we like it or not, whether we approve it or not, it is our destiny to play the lead role in the great drama of postwar development, but we could weigh the scales in favor of peace and prosperity for mankind only if we continue to preserve and strengthen the economic system. (Quoted in The Washington Post, 25 March 1943) As the new president of the MPPDA, Johnston focused on the interests of the US film ­industry. On his appointment, he said that he was “attracted to the motion picture ­industry ­because it offers unlimited opportunities to work for peace and prosperity at home and abroad,” underscoring the international aspirations of the MPPDA and echoing his earlier statements on free trade and the superiority of the American way of life. He added that he wanted “a fair share of foreign markets” and that he expected other countries to “not erect barriers against American pictures” as the USA had no “artificial barriers against foreign imports” (New York Times, 20 September 1945: 25). By the end of October 1945, Johnston had renamed the association the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA). By December, he had also created the MPEA to specifically deal with foreign trade issues. The second organization was established to circumvent laws in the USA relating to antitrust and collusion among companies in an industry. Under 148

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the Export Trade Act of 1918, better known as the Webb-Pomerene Act, it was possible to evade domestic laws and operate as a cartel abroad to better withstand the competition and thus safeguard American interests. In practice, the MPAA and the MPEA remained very closely tied. For example, Variety, the leading film trade publication, reported that at one meeting of the MPAA, members simply adjourned and started the MPEA meeting with no interruption, because the membership of the two organizations was identical. The creation of the MPEA strengthened the position of Hollywood’s eight biggest studios and allowed its members to continue working as a cartel, under the guidance of a fresh and ambitious leader.3 Initially, Johnston stayed on with the Chamber and kept a low profile until the spring of 1946, when he switched his attention fully to the film industry, often traveling to ­Europe to negotiate with countries and prevent them from undertaking activities designed to facilitate their own industries and put the USA at a disadvantage. For example, in 1946 and 1947, he sought to persuade the British government to remove the stringent taxes they were imposing on US films and replace them with other solutions such as a freeze on exporting profits (Variety, 13 August 1947: 1 and 20 August 1947: 1). After the war, most European countries – among them France, Italy, Spain, Denmark, Norway, and Britain – renewed the policies that protected their national film industries from American dominance by adding taxation, import quotas or screening quotas (Guback, 1969: 16–36, 113–116). All required the MPEA’s full attention as the foreign market had become indispensable to Hollywood (Guback, 1969: 91). The Netherlands was only one of the countries the MPEA had to deal with, but it was the only country that reacted to the MPEA’s attempts to open its market with a counter boycott (Segrave, 1997: 207).4 To the world outside the USA, the MPEA acted as a united organization and Johnston purported to represent the entire film industry. Within the industry, however, opinions were divided about strategy, with independent producers arguing that the State and Treasury Departments – not the MPEA – should negotiate for the film industry as they had more options to exert effective pressure on foreign governments (Variety, 24 September 1947: 6, 16). While the MPEA appeared willing to accept Great Britain’s freeze on exporting profits, the independents strongly opposed it, since they had fewer options to invest their profits in foreign countries.5

The Netherlands Cinema Association In the Netherlands, the organization of the NBB differed significantly from that of the MPAA and MPEA. After initial power struggles in the early 1920s, the NBB had become the only organization to represent every company related to film production, distribution, and exhibition. Because members could only trade with each other, and because the NBB did not allow distributors to rent films to exhibitors who were not members, it had almost complete power over the Dutch film market (Dibbets, 1986; Sedgwick, Pafort-Overduin, and Boter, 2012; Van Oort, 2017). Exercising this power to control the size of the cinema market, the NBB insisted that new distribution or exhibition businesses secure the approval of its Executive Board. This policy was very restrictive, requiring that new entrants not engage in “overproduction,” “excess competition,” or a “monopolistic position”; newcomers were only permitted if they met “the requirements of solvency, commercial knowledge, competence and decency” and if existing businesses could “not supply the need” (NBB and Nederlandsche Stichting voor Statistiek, 1945: 9). If one wanted to operate in the Dutch cinema market, it was simply impossible to circumvent the NBB. Before the Second World War 149

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several attempts had been made by American film companies to strengthen their position in the Dutch film market, but the NBB prevented this, for example by denying MGM a license to open its own cinema in Amsterdam and denying United Artists a license to open its own distribution office in the Netherlands, on the grounds that this would harm the Dutch distributor who imported United Artists films (De Tijd, 7 June 1939). Cartels like the NBB were very common in the Netherlands and other European countries, especially after the First World War. According to Bram Bouwens and Joost Dankers, the Dutch government chose not to intervene and even started to encourage cooperation and collusion in the 1930s to lessen the effects of the economic depression. In 1939, with war on the horizon, the Dutch government even encouraged vertical integration and ­e stablished offices for all branches of various industries to support cooperation. Under German ­occupation 1940–1945, the market was completely regulated and the cartels temporarily lost their role (­Bouwens and Dankers, 2010: 752–757). The NBB was dissolved and replaced by the so-called Film Guild of the Dutch Culture Chamber (Nederlandsche Kultuurkamer, NKK), which was tasked with regulating film production, distribution, and exhibition. The occupying forces closed off the Dutch market to American films and mainly allowed ­German films (Schiweck, 2002: 252; Leeflang, 2009: 125). Although the NBB had formally been dissolved, its Board still met during the war and outlined a policy meant to minimize government interference and restore its pre-war status when the war finally ended (NBB, 1947: 5). Through a fierce lobbying effort, involving the closure of more than half of the existing cinemas in the Netherlands in the summer of 1945, the NBB achieved the abolition of the Dutch Film Import and Distribution Body, established the previous year by the Dutch Government in exile and intended to create a state-controlled film market with oversight over film rental prices, exhibition permits, and the salaries of all employees working in the film business (NBB, 1947: 17).

The conflict With the battle against their own government won, the NBB focused on another front and matched its strength against the MPAA (the MPEA still being in the process of creation in September 1945). To start the film business going again, the NBB announced a “Distribution Decision” indicating that all contracts that had been postponed by the occupying forces, involving some 600 films, could now be executed (“Notulen Bestuursvergaderingen ­Bedrijfsafdeling Filmverhuurders van de Nederlandsche Bioscoop Bond 15 Mei 1945” (“Minutes Board Film Distributors NBB 15 May 1945”); NBB, 1947: 45). The American distributors had not, however, been consulted, and because they were overstocked with new films which they had not been able to export, they regarded this arrangement as against their interests. According to the NBB, the “Hays office” had also made the unacceptable demand that the structure of the NBB should be changed to give “the Americans” at least 49 ­percent of votes initially and a majority vote in the long run (“Notulen Buitengewone Ledenvergadering Bedrijfsafdeling Filmverhuurders 14 September 1946” (“Minutes extraordinary ­General Meeting Distributors NBB 14 September 1946”); Officieel Orgaan 126, 1946: 3). When negotiations did not bring a solution, the Dutch offices of five majors – Loew’s/MGM Film, Netherlands Fox Film Corp., Paramount Films, RKO Radio Films, and W ­ arner Bros. – ­a nnounced their resignation from the NBB on 30 September 1945. United Artists, Columbia, and Universal, which did not have offices in the Netherlands and were not members of the NBB but had contracts with members of the NBB, also sided with the resigning majors (NBB, 1947: 44–45; Weekly Variety, 20 February 1946: 13).6 150

The high stakes conflict

Although the resignation of the five companies only went into effect on 31 December 1945, Johnston ordered that all MPEA members’ distribution contracts with the Netherlands were to be put on hold from October 1945 (Officieel Orgaan 122, 1945: 14–16). In February 1946, the MPEA threatened to withdraw from dealing with the NBB altogether and started contacting Dutch theater owners directly (Weekly Variety, 20 February 1946: 13). Seeking to break the unity of the NBB members, the MPEA even announced a first step to victory by declaring that Dutch exhibitors had “signified willingness to book American films provided they could be assured of at least a year’s supply of product” (New York Times, 23 March 1946: 8). This strategy failed, however, with only six NBB members taking up the offer (“­Notulen Buitengewone Ledenvergadering Bedrijfsafdeling Filmverhuurders 14 September 1946” (“Minutes extraordinary General Meeting Distributors NBB 14 September 1946”)). In early April 1946, the conflict intensified as the MPEA opened a campaign in thirteen countries to combat monopolistic motion picture practices they regarded as against their interests.7 In launching the campaign, Johnston emphasized the importance of unity between the MPEA members and the independents, asserting that “much as we disbelieve in monopolistic cartels, our only defense for the time being is in dealing as a collective unit. As soon as we are free to deal competitively in these countries, the association will be dissolved” (New York Times, 5 April 1946: 21). The NBB responded with a publicity campaign declaring that its members would not be intimidated by “the economic aggression of the MPEA” and that it would not let another country “dictate” what would be shown on Dutch cinema screens. Insisting that this was not about “economic power but about the freedom on the screen,” the NBB announced that its members would not do business with any member of the MPEA, effectively boycotting the organization (Officieel Orgaan 126, 1946: 1–5). By framing the conflict as one of principle about independence and self-determination, the NBB sought to create support for its boycott of American films. Presenting itself as the courageous underdog and referring to the MPEA as the “new dictators” – thus indirectly putting its liberators on par with its recent occupiers – it strove to convince Dutch audiences that it was in their best interest that they be deprived of the major Hollywood films they had not been able to watch for years (Officieel Orgaan, 1946, 122: 1–18). By the end of July, negotiations remained deadlocked, as the NBB continued to refuse permission for MPEA members to build showcase theaters or for NBB members to trade with non-NBB members (NBB, 1947: 49–50; Daily Variety, 26 July 1946: 11). Faced with the NBB’s intransigence, Johnston turned to the Dutch government, sending MPEA vice-­ president Francis S. Harmon and his assistant Gerald Mayer to the Netherlands (Daily Variety, 26 July 1946: 11, 2 August 1946: 1). At the end of August Harmon and Mayer met with the Dutch Secretary of Education, J. J. Gielen. The NBB was “summoned” to the Ministry on the same day, but was kept out of the main meeting, instead meeting with H. J. Reinink, Secretary General of the Ministry of Education. Reinink informed the NBB that he would appreciate a dissolving of “this most unpleasant conflict,” which might have negative repercussions on other Dutch-American negotiations. Insulted, the NBB left, refusing to succumb to pressure. After further intervention by the Secretary of Education, an agreement was finally reached in late August, coming into effect on 16 September (“Minutes extraordinary General Meeting Distributors NBB 14 September 1946”; Annual Report 1945–1946: 53–54). Under the agreement, the Americans did not get the wished for minimum of 49 percent of votes, but the MPEA was permitted to become a member of the NBB, provided that it represent at least five American companies. It would only have one vote in the general meeting. The five Dutch distribution branches of the majors (Loew’s/MGM Film, Netherlands 151

Clara Pafort-Overduin and Douglas Gomery

Fox Film Corp., Paramount Films, Warner Bros., and RKO Radio Films), which had each had a vote before the conflict, were now left with one vote for the five. The five majors were given the choice to either unite under the MPEA or return as individual members, effectively restoring the situation to what it was before the conflict, thus undermining the power of the MPEA. Columbia, United Artists, and Universal, which had no office in the Netherlands, could apply for membership but had to go through the same procedure as any other new business. To ensure fair treatment for the Americans, one of the members of the committee dealing with applications for new businesses would be an American. MGM was granted permission to build a new cinema in Amsterdam on the building lot it had acquired before the Second World War. Of the six cinemas that had dealt directly with the MPEA, four were expelled from the NBB and two were to be closed unless they changed owners. The old contracts which had led to the conflict were quietly dropped, with NBB Chairman M.P.M. Vermin declaring that it was in no one’s interest to execute old contracts when new ones had been concluded (“Minutes extraordinary General Meeting Distributors NBB 14 September 1946”). The agreement did not mean that all problems in the Dutch market had been resolved. There was still the conflict about the government-imposed constraint on the number of American films that could be imported, aimed at reducing the extremely high trade deficit (Van Zande, 1997: 175). Here, however, the interests of the NBB and the MPEA more or less coincided. Neither party would benefit if the import of new films was curtailed, so this did not lead to another boycott.

The effect of the boycotts on Dutch film programs Our analysis so far has dealt with two aspects of the conflict: the confrontation between the two cartel-like organizations and the legal controversies they had with authorities. Both organizations had difficulties maintaining a united front. The MPEA had to persuade the independents, who represented about 30 percent of American films on the Dutch market (see Table 12.2), that it was in their best interest to respect the boycott and to forsake the shortterm profits that would be available if they filled the gap created by the boycotting parties.8 The NBB had to prevent its exhibitor members from trading directly with the MPEA. To understand how successful both strategies were, we shift our focus to the exhibition practices of Dutch cinema owners. We have created a data set containing 3,044 film programs from 86 cinemas in 14 cities and towns, covering the period from September 1944 to December 1947. In the analysis that follows, we have included only the six towns for which we have complete film programming data for the period before, during, and after the conflict, resulting in a total of 1,588 film programs composed of 620 individual films.9 For each film we added information about the country of origin, the year of production, the production company, the distributor (in the Netherlands), and the date of censorship. For the American films, we also recorded whether the production company and the distributor was a member of the MPEA or an independent. To establish the effect of the boycott we divided our data into four periods: from the liberation of the town (this differed across the country)10 to the start of the conflict on 30 September 1945; the period of the MPEA’s boycott from 1 October 1945 to 30 March 1946; the second phase of the conflict, in which the NBB stopped doing business with the MPEA, from 1 April to 14 September 1946; and the period immediately after the conflict was resolved, from 15 September to 7 October 1946. For each period, we established the distribution of films by their country of origin, year of production, and production company. 152

The high stakes conflict

Before analyzing the composition of the market share of American films we present an overview of the country of origin in Table 12.1 which shows the effect of both boycotts. The share of US films diminished from 64 percent before the conflict to 40 percent during the NBB boycott. While the latter figure is still quite high, a more detailed examination of the data makes it clear that independents filled part of the gap left by the MPEA members, with the percentage of MPEA members’ films dropping 43 percent in the first phase of the conflict and 34 percent in the second (see Table 12.2). The declining availability of American films left room for more heterogeneous programming. In particular, French and British films profited from the conflict, with their shares dropping again as soon as the conflict ended (see Table 12.1). The total US share did not regain the pre-conflict level immediately after agreement was reached, but this is probably explained by the fact that not enough time in our data had elapsed for the parties to adjust. A more detailed analysis reveals that during both boycotts, very few of the films of MPEA members were new to the market. As Table 12.3 indicates, the number of new films produced by MPEA members entering the Dutch market dropped sharply and stayed low during the period. Concurrently, the number of new films from other countries skyrocketed. Table 12.1  Number and percentage of movies on the Dutch market by country of origin in the four periods Country of origin

Before the conflict

Boycott by the MPEA Boycott by the NBB

Number of movies

Percentage Number of movies

Percentage Number of movies

Percentage Number of movies

Percentage

USA UK France Other Unknown Total

53.5* 13.5* 3 7 6 83

64 16 4 8 7 100

50 15 27 6 2 100

40 25 24 10 1 100

56 22 13 8 2 100

138.5* 42 76 15.5* 5 277

105 65 63 26 3 262

After the conflict

108 42 26 15 3 194

*  The half number is a co-production that was counted as half for both countries. Table 12.2  Share of MPEA members and nonmembers in the total amount of American films on the Dutch market during the four periods of the conflict

31% 57%

66%

70%

Percentage films of members MPEA

69% 43%

Before the conflict

Percentage films of nonmembers MPEA

Boycott MPEA

34%

30%

Boycott NBB

After the conflict

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Clara Pafort-Overduin and Douglas Gomery Table 12.3  N  umber of new films on the Dutch market Before the conflict 31 New films MPEA members New films non-MPEA 13.5 members New films other 16.5 countries

Boycott by MPEA

Boycott by NBB

After the conflict

13

6

21

13.5

6

27

24.5

67

56

 ew films and old films from MPEA members Table 12.4  N Before the conflict

Boycott MPEA

Boycott NBB

After the conflict

New films Old films New films Old films New films Old films New films Old films Columbia 6 Hal Roach 0 Studios 4 Loew’s/MGM* 4 Paramount* 4 RKO* Goldwyn 0 5 Twentieth Century Fox* 4 Universal** 4 Warner Bros* Total 31 **

0 0

1 0

27 0

2 0

13 4

0 0

1 1

2 0 1 1 1

3 1 2 0 3

0 0 1 8 0

0 0 0 0 0

1 0 2 4 1

5 4 0 2 1

0 0 1 0 0

1 0 6

3 0 13

8 1 45

4 0 6

1 1 27

7 2 21

2 1 6

*  Resigned from the NBB. **  Supported the resignation.

A closer examination of the composition of the films from MPEA is presented in Table 12.4. The films shown in the Dutch cinemas were divided into “New films” and “Old films.” The former were films that premiered on the Dutch market after the war, while the latter had been distributed before the war and had been on the shelves of the distribution offices or maybe even had been stayed behind in some of the cinemas. As Table 12.4 shows, while the boycott was effective in curtailing the appearance of new films, the number of old films remained relatively high. In particular, the old films of MPEA members that did not have a distribution branch in the Netherlands kept showing up during the conflict. Only Loew’s/MGM, Fox, Paramount, RKO, and Warner Bros were members of the NBB; the other MPEA members had contracts with Dutch distributors and, as Table 12.4 shows, the MPEA did not have many opportunities to control those distributors’ re-release of old films. A relatively high number of Columbia’s old films kept circulating in re-release, for example. The boycott proclaimed by the NBB reduced the number of old films slightly, but MPEA members still had more old films in circulation than new films. The blocking of new films from the MPEA members to the Netherlands was therefore very effective.11 154

The high stakes conflict Table 12.5  A mount and percentage of new films and old films on the Dutch market before, during, and after the conflict  

Before the conflict

New American films 44.5 New films from 16.5 other countries Old American films 8 Old films from other 7 countries Unknown 7 Total 83

54% 20%

Boycott by MPEA 26.5 24.5

Boycott by NBB

After the conflict

10% 9%

18 67

7% 26%

48 56

25% 29%

10% 8%

111 110

40% 40%

87 87

33% 33%

60 27

31% 14%

8% 100%

5 277

2% 100%

3 262

1% 100%

3 194

2% 100%

For Dutch audiences, consequently, the conflict meant a curtailed choice, limited to relatively old films that had all been on the market before. As Table 12.5 demonstrates, the percentage of new American films dropped dramatically when the MPEA proclaimed the first boycott. During the second period, the share of new films rose again as the gap left behind by MPEA members was filled with films from other countries, especially Great Britain and France (see Table 12.1). The NBB boycott improved Dutch cinemagoers’ choices slightly, but the majority of the films were still old. It is remarkable that although our data cover only three weeks after the end of the conflict, the percentage of new films rose and increased significantly to 51 percent.

Conclusion For this case study, we have combined an institutional analysis with an examination of programming data. By adding an extra layer from programming information, we have been able to bring audiences into the analysis and show how the boycott affected their choices. These data also made visible the extent to which the newly formed MPEA controlled its members and the extent to which the independent distributors were able to profit from the gap created by the boycott. The overall analysis shows that the cartel structure of the NBB was very effective in withstanding both national and international pressure. For Dutch audiences, the boycott meant a wider selection of British and French films, and a more limited choice of (new) American films. Exhibitors were able to overcome the lack of new American films by screening shelved films (American and other) from before the war, and new films from European countries. The old American films could not fill the gap completely, but their circulation still kept the total share of American films high during the conflict. The limited availability of new American films did not cause audiences to stay away from the cinema, just as audiences kept going to films during the war when German films dominated the screens. Indeed, cinema attendance had risen from 40.4 million admissions in 1939 to 55.4 million in 1943. In 1946 the number of admissions reached an all-time high of 88.7 million (Borsboom, 1995: 201–202). This raises interesting questions about the extent to which Dutch audiences were interested in the American way of life which, Johnston argued, was what drew audiences to Hollywood films. The Dutch certainly indicated their interest in seeing all types of films even when new Hollywood films were not available. The programming information showed that the MPEA controlled its members but also made clear that the nonmembers from the US industry quickly filled the gap; their share rose 155

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from 31 percent from before the boycott to 70 percent shortly after it ended. The ease with which nonmembers stepped in, allowing the NBB to simply replace American films with ­European ones, laid bare the relative vulnerability of the Hollywood majors and indicates the risk that the MPEA was willing to take. The Dutch market might have been small, and from an economic viewpoint the Netherlands was hardly able to seriously harm the MPEA’s ­interests, but it was not the only market at stake and might have been important for setting precedents elsewhere. This would explain the intensity that the MPEA brought to the dispute. In larger European markets such as Great Britain, France, and Italy, the MPEA’s strategy was the same as in the Netherlands: accept short-term losses by withholding all film distribution in order to achieve long-term profitability. In executing this strategy, it made use of the American government, including ambassadors and diplomats, and on occasion pressured those running the Marshall plan, the postwar economic investment plan to help European countries recover from the war, to convince unwilling trade partners (Guback, 1969: 23, 200). The hardline attitude of the MPEA demonstrated a united front to its members and to the outside world. The conflict with the NBB illustrates that the newly created MPEA cartel could not easily defeat another cartel, even if it only represented a small market. After each of the MPEA’s strategies had been tried, it was blocked from direct access to the exhibitors market; the NBB still determined the rules and controlled the Dutch film market. The MPEA successfully claimed membership in the NBB, but it represented only five of the eight majors and had only one vote in the general meeting. The MPEA’s interests were better served with an American member on the committee deciding on the acceptance of new businesses, but it still had no unfettered entry to the Dutch cinema theater market either. For the NBB the outcome of the conflict meant a restoration of its position from before the war. Its unity had not been shattered by the MPEA and on the national level it had convinced the Dutch government that it was in the best interest of the Netherlands to leave the regulation of the film market to the NBB. The government instead focused on film as a cultural product and for the first time reserved a small amount in the 1946 national budget to support the production of cultural films (Verdaasdonk, 1990: 24–26). The NBB would continue to control the film market until 1992 when it was absorbed into the Nederlandse Federatie voor Cinematografie (Dutch Federation for Cinematography) (Nederlandse Bond van Bioscoop-en Filmondernemingen & Nederlandse Federatie voor de Cinematografie, 1992: 3). Our case study shows how grass-roots evidence gathered through film programming information can enrich a top-down analysis and deepen our understanding of how an international conflict plays out on a local level and what it means for cinemagoers. It has allowed us to examine some of the subtleties in the market’s response to the boycott. This kind of detailed information is generally not available in institutional sources, at least not at the local level. In our case, while data on the total number of American films on the Dutch market were available, there was no information about these films’ producers and distributors (see for example, Guback, 1969: 40). Only by adding this information, gathered from exhibition programs, could we establish the success of the boycott and explain how the NBB could hold its ground.

Notes 1 The authors wish to thank Marilyn Moon for her insightful comments on earlier versions of this chapter. 2 See, for example, “South America Seeking Trade, Johnston Says.” The Washington Post, 22 March 1943: p. 5; “Johnston to Study Wartime Economy.” The Washington Post, 18 July 1943: p. M8; “Johnston Optimistic on Postwar Trade Outlook.” The Washington Post, 3 September 1943: p. 9;

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The high stakes conflict “Eric Johnston Accepts Russia’s Invitation to Inspect Soviet Union” 1944, The Washington Post, 22 March 1944: p. 1. 3 In 1945–1946 the MPAA had 25 members (Ramsaye, 1946: 695). 4 In 1954, Norwegian exhibitors boycotted Warner and Paramount films when these majors refused to lower the rental fee for special movies. The boycott lasted for a couple of months after which the old agreement was confirmed again (Segrave, 1997: 207). 5 Guback (1969: 121) cites Johnston explaining the variety of ways in which the majors transferred frozen money to the USA. For example, they raised and repaired a sunken tanker in Marseilles harbour, paying for it in Francs and then shipped the tanker to the USA, where it was sold for dollars. 6 Croeze & Bosman, Inc. was the mother company of Columbia International Film, Inc. and Universal Film Booking Office, Inc.; Loet Barstijn Standaard Films, Inc. distributed United Artists films. See www.cinemacontext.nl [Accessed 28 November 2018]. 7 The countries involved were the Netherlands and Netherlands East Indies, Austria, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, West and East Germany, Japan, Hungary, Korea, Poland, Romania, Russia, and Yugoslavia. 8 This concurs with the estimation of the NBB. In the minutes, it was stated that the resigning five major companies represented about 60 percent of the American film supply. So there was a considerable gap to be filled at the Dutch market. (Notulen vergadering Bedrijfsafdeling Filmverhuurders, 27 September 1945: 6). 9 The towns are Alkmaar; Amsterdam; Apeldoorn*; Culemborg; Den Bosch*; Den Haag; ­Dordrecht; Eindhoven; Groningen*; Heerlen; Maastricht*; Nijmegen*; Schiedam*; Tilburg*. *=complete. We are very grateful to students from the undergraduate research class “Dutch Film Culture”, 2013 and 2014, who helped to gather the data. 10 The Netherlands was liberated on 5 May 1945 but the south of the Netherlands was liberated about eight months earlier than the north. The liberation date of the towns was: Apeldoorn 17 April 1944; Den Bosch 22 October 1944; Groningen 21 April 1945; Maastricht 14 September 1944; Nijmegen 20 September 1944; Schiedam 5 May 1945; Tilburg 27 October 1944. 11 Four of the six films from MPEA members premiered during the boycotts had been approved by the censors at the beginning of the war and had been on the shelves for years. The two other Universal films were presented to the censors during the boycott and were distributed by Universal Film Booking Office. The only other MPEA member which increased the number of its films on the Dutch market during the conflict was Samuel Goldwyn Productions, but all the films involved were re-releases produced between 1934 and 1938.

References Borsboom, E. (1995) “100 years of cinema exhibition in the Netherlands – a historical profile.” In MEDIA Salles Research Group (ed.) European Cinema Yearbook 1995. Milan: MEDIA Salles (pp. 199–206). Bouwens, B. and Dankers, J. (2010) “The Invisible Handshake: Cartelization in the Netherlands, 1930–2000.” Business History Review 84 (Winter): 751–771. Dibbets, K. (1986) “Het bioscoopbedrijf tussen twee wereldoorlogen.” In K. Dibbets and F. van der Maden (eds.) Geschiedenis van de Nederlandse film en bioscoop tot 1940 (The History of the Dutch Film and Cinema until 1940). Houten: Het Wereldvenster (pp. 229–270). Greenwald, W. I. (1952) “The Control of Foreign Trade: A Half-Century of Film Trade with Great Britain.” The Journal of Business of the University of Chicago 25(1): 39–49. Guback, T.H. (1969) The International Film Industry. Western Europe and America since 1945. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Guback, T.H. (1986) “Shaping the Film Business in Postwar Germany: The Role of the US Film Industry and the US State.” In P. Kerr (ed.) The Hollywood Film Industry. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul (pp. 245–275). Jarvie, I. (1983) “International Film Trade: Hollywood and the British Market, 1945.” Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television 3(2): 161–169. Jarvie, I. (1986) “British Trade Policy Versus Hollywood, 1947–1948: ‘Food Before Flicks?’” Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television 6(1): 19–41.

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Clara Pafort-Overduin and Douglas Gomery Leeflang, T. (2009) Verboden voor Joden. De bioscoop in de oorlog (No Entry for Jews. The Cinema During the War). Soesterberg: Aspekt. León-Aguinaga, P. (2009) “State-Corporate Relations, Film Trade and the Cold War: The Failure of MPEAA’s Strategy in Spain, 1945–1960.” Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television 29(4): 483–504. Nederlandsche Bioscoop Bond and Nederlandsche Stichting voor Statistiek (1945) Cinema and Film Market in the Netherlands. Amsterdam: Nederlandse Bioscoop Bond. Nederlandse Bioscoop Bond (1947) Na twintig maanden wederopbouw. Verslag der Werkzaamheden ­1945–1946 (After Twenty Months Rebuilding. Annual Report 1945–1946). Amsterdam: NBB. Nederlandse Bond van Bioscoop- en Filmondernemingen en Nederlandse Federatie voor de Cinematografie (1992) Jaarverslag 1992 (Annual Report 1992). Amsterdam: NBBF & NFC. Ramsaye, T. (ed.) (1946) International Motion Picture Almanac 1945–1946. New York, NY: Quigley Publishing Company. Schiweck, I. (2002) “[…] weil wir lieber im Kino sitzen als in Sack und Asche.” Der deutsche Spielfilm in den besetzten Niederlanden 1940–1945. Münster: Waxmann Verlag. Sedgwick, J., Pafort-Overduin, C. and Boter, J. (2012) “Explanations for the Restrained Development of the Dutch Cinema Market in the 1930s.” Enterprise and Society 13(3): 634–671. Segrave, K. (1997) American Films Abroad. Hollywood’s Domination of the World’s Movie Screens from the 1890s to the Present. Jefferson, NC: McFarland. Treveri Gennari, D. (2009) Post-War Italian Cinema. American Intervention, Vatican Interests. London: Routledge. Van Oort, T. (2017) “Industrial Organization of Film Exhibitors in the Low Countries: Comparing the Netherlands and Belgium, 1945–1960.” Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television 37(3): 475–498. Van Zande, J.L. (1997) Een klein land in de 20e eew. Economische geschiedenis van Nederland 1914–1995 (The Economic History of the Netherlands 1914–1995). Utrecht: Het Spectrum. Verdaasdonk, D. (1990) Beroep Filmregisseur. Het verkrijgen van continuïteit in een artistiek beroep (Occupation Film Director. Continuation and An Artistic Careers). Zeist: Kerckebosch.

Newspapers and Trade Press “De pers veroordeelt eensgezind het optreden der M.P.E.A. (1946) Officieel Orgaan van den Nederlandschen Bioscoop Bond, 126: 7–18. “Dreigend conflict in Bioscoop Bond?” (1939) De Tijd, 7 June. “Economische agressie” (1946) Officieel Orgaan van den Nederlandschen Bioscoop Bond, 126: 1–6. “Eric Johnston speaks Tuesday” Spokane Daily Chronicle, 1 May 1942. “Hays’ movie post goes to Johnston: Outgoing movie ‘Czar’ greets his successor” New York Times, 20 September 1945. “Moves Begin to Fight Foreign Monopolies” New York Times, 5 April 1946. “Uitspraken Commissie van geschillen” (1945) Officieel Orgaan van den Nederlandschen Bioscoop Bond, 122:14–16. “United States C. of C. Urges Open Shop” The Washington Post, 1 May 1942. “US Film Studios Break Dutch Ban” New York Times, 23 March 1946. “The Road to Realism” The Washington Post, 25 March 1943. Daily Variety, 26 July 1946; 2 August 1946. Weekly Variety, 20 February1946; 6; 13 August 1947; 20 August 1947; 24 September 1947

Archives Eye Film Institute: Archief Nederlandse Bioscoopbond (Archive Dutch Cinema Association). Nationaal Archief (National Archive): Ministerie van Buitenlandse Zaken (State Department); 2.05.117.

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13 “Perhaps everyone has forgotten just how pictures are shown to the public” Continuous performance and double billing in the 1930s Richard Maltby In April 1934, in an editorial article in the Motion Picture Herald, its publisher Martin Quigley denounced “a vastly destructive practice which has long been tolerated” in the motion picture industry. Quigley was at the time embroiled in negotiations between the major companies and the hierarchy of the Catholic Church over the stage management of the Legion of Decency’s public campaign against indecency in the movies, but that issue was not his immediate concern. Instead, the destructive practice of which he complained was the arrangement under which a great part of all theatre audiences are allowed—or ­compelled—to see pictures not from the start but from some medium point on to the end and then, after viewing intervening material, are returned to observe the opening scenes. (Quigley, 1934) The practice he was referring to, “the grind idea which was born with the nickelodeon and should have died with it,” was according to Quigley a relic of “the nascent days of the business,” before the rise of feature programming in the 1910s when, because there was “little or nothing in the way of continuity to what then passed for stories … it made but little difference, as far as enjoyment of the show was concerned, at what point the patron entered.” An inheritance from the presentation of vaudeville, continuous performance persisted in the practices of both programming and advertising, in which starting times were seldom listed. According to Quigley, this near-universal condition of exhibition was unrecognized in Hollywood production circles, and absent from all discussions of contemporary business problems: we have not seen a single written notice of this question, nor have we heard it mentioned. Apparently it is assumed that the routine does not do violence to pictures— which is manifestly wrong — or else it is assumed that the routine cannot be changed. Or perhaps everyone has forgotten just how pictures are shown to the public. (Quigley, 1934) 159

Richard Maltby

Quigley’s article drew considerable comment from all sectors of the industry, and a month later at least one theater ran what was a highly unusual advertising campaign for Death Takes a Holiday (Paramount, 1934), insisting that audiences saw it “from the beginning for your fullest enjoyment,” and declared “no one seated during last half hour of feature” (Motion Picture Herald, 1934d) (Figure 13.1). Most exhibitors, however, resisted Quigley’s suggestion on practical grounds: that “the present policy has been tested and tried by time”; that a fixed running time for shows, resulting in regular starting hours, did not work because of the variation in feature length; that audiences did not pay attention to advertised starting times; and that theaters changing programs several times a week would be unable to keep to standardized showing times (Motion Picture Herald, 1934b). Several theater managers insisted, with Ralph Cokain, of Marion, Indiana, that

Figure 13.1  Advertisement for Death Takes a Holiday at the Strand Theatre, Sunbury, PA, reproduced in Motion Picture Herald (May 12, 1934, p. 29)

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Continuous performance and double billing

The public doesn’t want to be warned or told when they should see a show—they want to see it when they are in the mood. We have shown mysteries, for which we instructed our ushers to seat no one during the last reel, kindly advising the patron that his enjoyment would be greatly enhanced if he saw the picture from the beginning. Many patrons, however, insisted on seeing the climax, stating they didn’t care what was going on, just so they could see the picture. On all pictures, with only a couple of minutes left, patrons have been advised of the almost immediate ending, yet insisted on being seated. (Motion Picture Herald, 1934f) Exhibitors maintained that ingrained audience habits were conditioned by many factors other than the program schedule – work schedules, meal times, transportation timetables – which influenced the habits of individual and families, as did the practice, in many first- and second-run theaters, of differential pricing according to the time of entry, which meant that “in most theatres, persons coming in just before a price change would find themselves right in the middle of a feature” (Kinsky, 1937). Joe Kinsky, the District Manager of Tri-States Theatres, explained that For the past several years we have educated our people that no matter when they care to attend a theatre they may do so; in other words, if Mrs. Jones finishes dinner at 7:15 and decides that she wants to see a show, she goes down to the theatre, arriving at 7:45 without any thought about it at all. Perhaps, if she looked in the paper and found the feature had started at 7:10 she would not have gone at all. ***** New cinema history is conditioned in its concerns and its focus by its cognizance of the centrality of social experience of cinema. This perspective provides it with a view from the audience, rather than from the producer. This is not to say that its interests are limited simply to audiences, their experiences, and their behaviors, but this perspective influences the manner of its engagement with industrial and aesthetic histories of cinema. In this chapter, I want to consider issues related to the domestic distribution of Hollywood cinema in the second half of the 1930s from this perspective, by looking at the effects on distribution – and therefore also on production – of two aspects of the temporality of the social experience of cinema conditioned by exhibition practice: continuous performance and double bills. Distribution remains the least-examined sector of the cinema system, both historically and from the point of contemporary analysis, but it was the central component – the e­ ngine – of Classical Hollywood’s oligopoly system. Through what Charles Pettijohn in 1940 called “the physical task of distributing 25 to 30 thousand miles of film every day to 16,500 theatres located in 9,187 cities, towns, villages, and hamlets” (Hearings, 1940: 462) the majors’ distribution system managed both “the flow of attractions from the producing studios to the theatres and the flow of revenue from its source at the box offices to the producers and sources of supply” (Palfreyman, 1935). Structurally as well as procedurally, distribution connected production to exhibition as the point of intersection and communication between manufacture and retail. Distribution controlled exhibitors’ – and therefore audiences’ – a­ ccess to films, and producers’ access to exhibition venues and audiences. It served as the means by which revenue was allocated to industry sectors, and the industry’s trade practices – its 161

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typology of theatrical venues, its differentiated systems of release, its operation of extended runs and its programming of films into its run-clearance system in each of its geographical zones, its deployment of percentage and fixed-price rental rates, and the Standard Exhibition Contract – all existed primarily to govern the division of profit within the system. Although in practice distribution responded flexibly to particular market conditions that applied in any given local exhibition situation, the Classical oligopolists, unsurprisingly, ran the system to their benefit. Distribution was also the sector of the cinema system in which cinema was at its most material, in which film was reduced to celluloid articles of commerce in identical, interchangeable cans, and thus subject to the laws of commerce, in the form of both the demands for profit and the restraints of legislation. In both production and exhibition, movies were individuated, as creation and as experience. But in distribution, they became just product, with the distribution service providing a reliable product stream, sold at a constant price, regardless of the cost of manufacture of any individual film product, simultaneously exploiting differences between individual films by promoting the most successful product and suppressing them in order to market the less successful product. Distribution was, therefore, the part of the cinema system in which the idea of film scholarship without films is most evidently imaginable, and the sector where cinema was most clearly, in Justice McKenna’s resonant phrase in the Supreme Court’s Mutual v. Ohio decision, “a business pure and simple,” which by not providing motion pictures with the legal protections of art rendered them subject to the laws governing interstate commerce, including the antitrust laws (Mutual v Ohio, 1915; Afra, 2016: 14). By the mid-1920s, there existed something that could fairly be described as a stable ­cinema exhibition system in the USA. That certainly did not mean that all its component parts were stable: as many as 20 percent of theaters changed ownership annually, affected by the booms and busts of the broader economy, and within the system there was a constant struggle for commercial advantage between venues (Hays, 1929). But the physical mechanics and organizational underpinnings of the system – the operations of zoning and clearance and the hierarchy of runs, the practices of block booking and the Standard Exhibition Contract, the division of revenue among the tiers of exhibition, and what Mae Huettig (1944: 115) called “the practices that shape movie-going habits, that explain what becomes of pictures missed during the first-run, why they may suddenly turn up simultaneously at six or eight different theatres on identical double bills, and why the double bill must be suffered at all,” remained broadly consistent from year to year. Within this system, cinemas were essentially divided into two strata: those provided by distributors with a selective service, in which the exhibitor exercised considerable individual choice over the films they screened and the duration of those screenings, and those provided with a standard service, broadly defined by the terms of the Standard Exhibition Contract (Maltby, 2013). This distinction loosely corresponded to that between circuit theaters – whether affiliated to the majors or not – and independent theaters, and also corresponded to a fundamental difference in the revenues and profits they generated, more-or-less inversely proportionate to the number of each type. In circulation, films also existed in two forms, corresponding to the two elements of the exhibition system. In roadshows, premieres, first-run, and some second-run venues, films were exhibited and marketed as individual objects, having individual economic lives and generally being sold on percentage contracts and shown for variable periods depending on their audience appeal and profitability. In subsequent run, films were a service supplied in bulk to theaters with regular change policies. The Standard Exhibition Contract declared that 162

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It is expressly understood and agreed that the Distributor does not license hereunder to the exhibitor any particular motion picture but only those motion pictures are licensed hereunder which shall be generally released by the Distributor as provided in the schedule above; that the announcement book, work sheet, press sheet, or any other announcement issued by the Distributor is issued for the purpose only of indicating what the Distributor plans to produce and does not constitute any warranty or representation that the motion pictures therein referred to or described will be generally released during the period provided in the Schedule. (Paramount Exhibition Contract, 1939, in Hearings, 1940: 235) These distribution arrangements served primarily to maintain product differentiation within a geographical market, with the clear purpose of differentiating between theaters and the different levels of service they offered. The movie may have been, at one level, the product, but what the public was buying was, as Robert Allen (2006: 48) insists, “the social e­ xperience of cinema,” and one purpose of the system was to maintain what Jeffrey Klenotic (1998: 490–1) has called “the hierarchically organized provision of ‘something for everyone’ — culturally and socially safe spaces for its various audiences.” As Klenotic (2001, 2007) has demonstrated in his analysis of the cultural geography of Springfield, MA, the social safety of each space was determined, in substantial part, by the sociality of its particular audience, and that in turn was conditioned by the social – that is, class – environment of the theater. As products, movies may have been classless, but the social experience of moviegoing was permeated and even determined by the class-based experiences of social viewing. The instruments through which this system was maintained were the subject of constant litigation, and the interminable arguments over these trade practices that ran through the courts, Boards of Arbitration, Congress and state legislatures as well as the pages of the trade press concerned themselves with the perceived inequities of the distribution system’s access to product and profit. It is a simplification – but not a gross simplification – to say that there were two groups of parties to these arguments: the major companies on one side, and independent exhibitors on the other. It is also a simplification, but again not a gross simplification, to say that the majors consistently tested the limits of the law in seeking to exercise control over the whole of the exhibition system, while independent exhibitors voiced more-or-less unchanging complaints about the majors’ predatory behavior and “strong arm dealing” throughout the 1920s and 1930s (Huettig, 1944: 38). For the major companies, which had constructed their expansion around the social differentiation provided by de luxe and first-run theaters, the maintenance of social hierarchies through the exhibition system was necessary to their return on their investment and profit maximization. The system required a premium price for fresh product and presented that product to an audience able to pay for it – an imagined community not fundamentally different from the “decent crowd” that Adrian Athique (2013: 383) has identified in aspirant middle-class audiences in contemporary Indian multiplexes, for whom attendance at the multiplex is “a marker of both affluence and good manners.” Antitrust action and the litigation of the independents – who largely catered to poorer audiences but wanted better access to new product – endangered this system of experiential product differentiation. During the 1930s, trade relations oscillated between periods of sullen stability and periods of outright conflict, which were usually triggered by a court decision that demolished a critical aspect of the existing terms of trade. Such an event occurred in 1935 with the Supreme Court’s ruling that the National Recovery Act was unconstitutional, and with it the Codes of Fair Competition that had been in operation for the previous two years. The motion 163

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picture industry’s Code had been written very much to the majors’ benefit, particularly in the restrictions it imposed on forms of non-price competition among exhibitors. Theaters competed with each other through both price and non-price mechanisms. Price competition was effectively regulated through the run-clearance system: lower-run theaters charged lower prices for audience access to older product; which is to say that price competition existed between theaters, not between films. Films were, in effect, one form of ­non-price competition between theaters, as were the attractions and convenience of the venue, and ancillary attractions such as Bank Night, giveaways and other premiums (­Fuller-Seeley, 2007). Programming enabled theaters to compete through the quantity of film entertainment offered, as well as its quality. The 1933 NRA Code of Fair Competition outlawed lotteries and giveaways, leaving double billing as the only approved non-price competitive tactic allowed to small exhibitors. The practice of double features had begun in New England in 1915, but it was not widely adopted elsewhere until 1930, when it began to be used by subsequent-run exhibitors in response to the business downturn and the extended protection and clearance restrictions curtailing their access to new product (Motion Picture Herald, 1931b). By November 1931, the practice had spread to Chicago, New York, Montreal, Cleveland, and Northern California, where it was adopted as a competitive strategy in the face of declining audiences. Adoption was initially inconsistent, with one explanation being that some audiences preferred “a 1½ to 2-hour entertainment of films to the usual 2½ to 3-hour double-feature program,” particularly in the summer (Beach, 1932: 508). In Chicago, the dominant circuit exhibitor Balaban and Katz (B&K, a subsidiary of Paramount) adopted double billing in all their large, air-conditioned neighborhood theaters in the summer of 1931, capitalizing on their advantages in having earlier access to product and the opportunity for savings in eliminating live entertainment and music from their performances.1 Unlike subsequent-run independent theaters, circuit theaters like B&K were able to secure two “good” pictures (recent quality, A-features, screened immediately after their first showings in the Loop), and they could play these double bills for a week, rather than the three- or four-change programs that subsequent-run theaters were forced to adopt. Within a few months, B&K had eliminated virtually all live entertainment and music from their theaters, suggesting that double billing, rather than sound, may have had a critical impact on the provision of live entertainment (Motion Picture Herald, 1931b). In Chicago, however, double billing initially lasted only a season, before a local agreement committing theaters to single-film screenings held for several years. Elsewhere the practice spread intermittently, delayed by the steady trend toward lower admission prices in the early 1930s and by local voluntary agreements among exhibitors to ban the practice, until declining audiences and competitive pressures forced a change. In any given location, it required only a minority of theaters to adopt double billing – as few as 15 percent – to force other theaters to do the same as a defensive measure. Few parties declared an enthusiasm for what was commonly referred to as “the double-feature evil,” with independents blaming circuits for overbuying, maintaining excessive clearance periods and other practices designed to “milk dry” all the best titles and secure the vast majority of box office earnings (Motion Picture Herald, 1937d). According to the Motion Picture Theatre Owners of America (1936), since the introduction of the National Recovery Administration Code of Fair Competition in November 1933, the problem has gotten completely out of hand, most of the theatres in competitive situations have been forced into double featuring whether they like it or not, and the “free and unrestrained” cut-rate competition by shoe-string exhibitors has forced double featuring to spread across the country. 164

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The majors tried and failed to outlaw double billing in the NRA Code, and the Code’s adoption produced a spike in its uptake.2 By April 1934, Monogram’s sales director Edward Golden estimated that 7,000 theaters – approximately half the theaters in the country – were playing double features (Motion Picture Herald, 1934a). The invalidation of the Code did not slow the spread of the practice, even as theaters re-adopted lotteries and giveaways. While the majors’ distribution arms generally deplored double features, their exhibition ­circuits ­adopted whatever policy gave them the strongest competitive advantage in each local ­situation: Warners, for example, exercised sufficient control over subsequent-run exhibition in Philadelphia to enforce a single-feature policy until the Supreme Court found them to be in breach of the antitrust laws, but resisted other distributors’ attempts to introduce a similar policy in St. Louis (Harrison’s Reports, 1936). By 1935, virtually all theaters in key centers such as New York, Los Angeles, St. Louis, New Haven, Detroit, Boston, and Kansas City had adopted double billing, although Milwaukee had returned to a single feature policy, and Chicago was still tenuously maintaining its single feature agreement (Motion Picture Herald, 1934g). In the summer of 1935, B&K planned to return to double bills, with some support from distributors preferring to direct revenue to extra bookings rather than to premiums and giveaways (Variety, 1935). In the event, they did not change policy until October 1936, and when they did, the change had the predicted effect of transferring box office revenue from the smaller lower-run independents to B&K’s three- and four-thousand-seat neighborhood theaters (Motion Picture Herald, 1937a). By 1937, there was sufficient evidence to suggest that the audiences that Edward R. Beach had somewhat disparagingly called “quantity shoppers” in the Harvard Business Review in 1932 were now in a majority, with little prospect of a return to single features in most markets, not least because of a widespread belief that the studios were not producing enough product of sufficiently high quality to sustain an evening’s program with a single feature (Beach, 1932: 507). The complaint over “quality” persisted both within and outside the industry. In February 1937, as the double-feature policy extended into Southern markets, J.H. Thompson, Vice-President of Southeastern Motion Picture Theatre Owners, called double features “an Octopus Strangling Quality and Receipts” and “a Frankenstein slowly crushing its creators to death,” and urged exhibitors to recognize that (Figure 13.2) the more we play double features, the more and worse pictures the producers are going to put out. And the greater the number of bad pictures which are made, just that many more poor pictures and double billings the exhibitor will have to run in order to get at those occasional good ones which sometimes do come out. And so on, ad infinitum and ad nauseam. (Motion Picture Herald, 1937b) David Palfreyman (1938), the head of the MPPDA’s Department of Theatre Service, told Will Hays: the forced circulation of cheap pictures of poor quality brought about by double featuring tends to drive a considerable amount of people out of the motion picture theatres.… They arrive in the theatre and see the last part of the picture which they came to see. They are then hooked and must sit through the poor grade picture … in order … to see the first part of the picture in which they are really interested. This unquestionably irritates many patrons in the audience who resent being compelled to look at the picture which they do not like in order to see the one they do like.… By reason of this artificial 165

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circulation and the more extended playing time that poor grade cheaply produced pictures can get, there is provided a strong incentive for the studios to turn out that sort of attraction to fill this market.… Pictures with very little entertainment value or quality are made profitable to the producing and distributing company by this sort of an operating policy, which tends to flood the market with this type of picture … jamming them down the throats of the theatre patrons tends to drive away patronage from the theatres. Jack L. Warner, Vice-President of Warner Bros., unsurprisingly agreed, mangling a metaphor and inventing a statistic to support his case: By playing double features, exhibitors are stuffing the golden goose (The Public) that lays the golden eggs (admissions) that pay the freight for the entire industry.… Because of double features it is practically impossible to enter a theatre without running smack into the middle of one or the other of the features. As it is, less than 10 per cent of double feature audiences see both pictures from the opening. (Motion Picture Herald, 1934c) Faced with the volume of demand from double billing, studios had to calculate what volume of production they required to maintain their control of distribution, and how thinly they had to spread their production budgets in order to do this. Newsweek (1937) suggested that two-thirds of Hollywood’s output in 1936 had been “Class B pictures.” In January 1939, Spyros Skouras argued that previously “it was only on rare occasions that a meritorious ‘B’ picture managed to play in a de luxe house.” Since the establishment of double bill policies in the majority of theaters, however, “B” product, which seemed to be ­preponderantly crime pictures, was “now shown in every de luxe theatre both in large c­ ities and in smaller communities and neighborhoods where family patronage predominates”

Figure 13.2  “An Octopus Strangling Quality and Receipts” (Motion Picture Herald, February 13, 1937, p. 70).

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(­Skouras, 1939). Producers and exhibitors alike attributed declining audiences to the perceived declining quality of the overall product offering, but theater managers contended that dual bills were commercially successful, predicting that “as long as photoplays are not of equal entertainment value the practice of balancing programs with two pictures probably will continue” (Motion Picture Herald, 1937c). ***** Audience responses to double billing seem to have been ambivalent or inconsistent. During the 1930s, the many surveys on the subject produced highly variable results, with some recording a four-to-one preference for single features and others producing similar figures in favor of double bills. One explanation offered was that when asked, a theater’s audience tended to endorse the screening policy of the theater they attended; other evidence suggested that older and more well-to-do audiences preferred single features, while younger and working-class audiences preferred doubles, a verdict that Skouras (1939) neatly summarized by observing “while the classes resent the double bill, the masses demand it.” ­Exhibitors who experimented by varying their screening practice found that regardless of polling results, double bills outperformed single features at the box office more often than not. Analyzing the inconsistency between polling and box office results in Chicago in 1937, a Variety headline suggested: “They Used to Vote Dry and Act Wet; Now Vote Singles But Buy Dual Pix”: Exhibitors have found that the women are particularly strong in their voting against the doubles, but more than men always head for the spot with the film bargain. And furthermore, that the general polls don’t take the vast army of juvenile picture fans into the count. For the kids, in a 100% bulk, seem to be strictly in favor of bigger, longer and more films for their dimes, and ofttimes sit through ’em twice.… Mothers are doing plenty of yelping about holding supper while the kids sit through the three and four-hour shows and for that reason putting up some squawks against the twin bargain. (Variety, 1937) A Gallup poll conducted in in July 1940 substantially confirmed industry assumptions about the preferences of different audience groups. While its aggregated figures suggested that 57 percent of the American public preferred single bills, the poll’s demographic breakdown exposed clear divergences between income- and age groups: the question “Would you rather go to a theater showing one full-length picture, or two full-length pictures?” produced the results shown in Table 13.1. The divergent tastes of different audience segments indicate the intractability of the ­double-bill “paradox,” as Gallup described it: Only by making pictures of greater appeal to those people who have sufficient money and who could attend theatres more often can the revenues of the industry be materially increased; and it is precisely these people who register the greatest opposition to double features.… Theatre owners … have long known that most people say they prefer single features; yet when individual exhibitors have changed from a double to a single policy, their business has declined. (Motion Picture Herald, 1940) 167

Richard Maltby Table 13.1  “ Would you rather go to a theater showing one full-length picture, or two full-length pictures?” (Gallup Poll, July 1940)

By income Upper-income group Middle-income group Lower-income group On relief By age Children under 12 Teenagers 12–17 Young people 18–24 People over 25 By sex Males Females By ticket price Paying less than 30¢ Paying more than 30¢

One (%)

Two (%)

75 63 47 42

25 37 53 58

23 42 60 68

77 58 40 32

56 58

44 42

51 67

49 33

Data from Motion Picture Herald (1940); see also Ohmer (2006).

Gallup estimated that the upper-income group accounted for only 17 percent of ticket sales: these most valuable customers, who spent most on their individual tickets, were also the most selective and therefore the least frequent or reliable attenders (Schatz, 1997: 75) (Figure 13.3). More tangible than the question of double billing’s impact on the quality of pictures was the practice’s effect on the duration of the show, which might last up to four hours, by comparison to the “balanced” single-feature program’s two-hour length (Chambers, 1938: 229). One respondent to a March 1937, Kansas City newspaper poll complained, “We go to the movies to be entertained, not detained” (Motion Picture Herald, 1937c); in October, two young men from Nutley, New Jersey who said they found a three-and-a-half-hour show on hard seats insulting to their intelligence, established the Anti Movie Double Feature League of America. “We just don’t happen to be the type that will sit around until 10 o’clock when we want to go to the movies,” they explained, and on the other hand we can’t get started early enough to get in for the 7 o’clock show. Like the majority of other people we arrive at a theatre between 8:30 and 9 o’clock, and are just in time to see most of a cheap picture. (Motion Picture Herald, 1937e) Exhibitors articulated similar difficulties over the programming of their evening shows and the need for them “to give their long-suffering patrons quantity instead of quality” because of “the tremendous amount of trash pictures turned out by Hollywood”: Mediocre pictures are having a telling effect on the public. That, plus the depression, has taught the better class patrons to shop for their entertainment very stintingly, whilst 168

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Figure 13.3  Educational Pictures advertisement (Motion Picture Herald, April 2, 1932, p. 45)

the poorer type of movie fan accepts the double-bill at the fifteen and twenty-five cents admission. Not, particularly, because they cannot pay more, but they have become educated to get all they can for the least amount of money. (Motion Picture Herald, 1934e) Richard McBride, one of Klenotic’s informants on moviegoing in Springfield, MA, e­ xpressed the same thought: “We liked the local theaters ’cause you would get so much more!” Where the higher-run theaters might show one cartoon, and then maybe a double feature if they had double features there, or maybe a real class A one. And that was it! Two and a half hours and you were out of there. Where if you went to the local ones, you generally got about four hours of hootin’ and hollerin’. (Klenotic, 2007: 153) For audiences, exhibitors and producers alike, double billing represented a trade-off between quality and duration. How determining audience attitudes were in maintaining the practice – as against exhibitors’ perceived competitive necessity – is uncertain. While some exhibitors claimed that the commercial benefits of double features showed in box office returns, others suggested that attendance was no higher than it would have been if all of the theaters in the areas exhibited single features only, while a 1938 Fortune survey found only one in ten participants willing to say that movies “gave the public what they wanted” (Chambers, 1938: 229; Ohmer, 2007: 147). The persistence and ubiquity of double billing 169

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in the second half of the 1930s suggests that, whether motivated by audience expectation or not, duration won out over both quality and, for some, convenience. As circuit manager Jack Shea insisted, “It is the people who plunk down their 20 cents, 30 cents or 40 cents regularly each week or twice weekly who support theater operations. And these people want all they can get for that money” (Variety, 1940). More acerbically, Business Week (1938) commented that The movie industry will [say] any time that the box office till rings louder for double features than it does for singles, which is the movie industry’s way of saying that double features are what the public wants and that the public would rather pay its two bits and get Greta Garbo, Jack Jones, a headache, and a sore fundament, than just plain Greta Garbo. But the persistence of the practice also suggests that audiences, in first-run houses as well as in subsequent-run neighborhoods, accepted an experience of cinema in which it was normative to arrive and leave in the middle of a narrative, at times suited to their own convenience rather than being determined by any part of the cinematic apparatus. For whatever reasons they practiced it, continuous performance programming facilitated this expression of audience autonomy; double-bill programs of up to four hours’ duration made it, for many spectators, an almost inevitable component of their cinema experience. As an inheritance of vaudeville, continuous performance provided a mechanism through which audiences could resist – or more probably ignore – the disciplinary practices of bourgeois cinema, by not conforming – again, ignoring may be the more appropriate term – to the ordered requirements of narrative and textual structure, by simply coming and going as they chose. They were aided in this behavior by exhibitors seeking to accommodate the schedules and rhythms of their daily lives, rather than to impose external structures on their pleasurable engagement with cinema. The adoption of double billing, on the other hand, was much less an outcome of audience preference than it was a phenomenon of distribution trade practice, competition between exhibitors, and the majors’ various strategies to secure as much of the total market as possible for their circuit theaters. Although there was widespread acknowledgment across all three sectors of the industry that the policy of double billing was “fundamentally unsound” in its erosion of product quality, the concerted action required to curb the practice was unachievable under the prevailing interpretation of competition law (Chambers, 1938: 236). As David Palfreyman (1938) observed, As long as keen and unrestrained competition between theatres exists in competitive areas and any theatre is free to offer two full length features for one admission, it is as a practical matter impossible for an individual theatre operator to resist the practice.

Notes 1 Chicago’s zoning system, which was entirely determined by admission pricing, was presented as a model system in 1931, but it came to be hated by independents because of Balaban and Katz’s dominance (Motion Picture Herald 1931a). 2 The National Recovery Administration received almost 15,000 protests against the proposal to eliminate double bills, including protests from both independent producers and independent ­exhibitors (Motion Picture Herald 1933); see also Bertrand (1936: 44); Muscio (1997: 117–25); Nizer (1935).

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References Afra, K. (2016) The Hollywood Trust: Trade Associations and the Rise of the Studio System. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Allen, R.C. (2006) “Relocating American Film History: The ‘Problem’ of the Empirical.” Cultural Studies 20(1): 48–88. Athique, A.M. (2013) “Imagining a ‘Decent Crowd’ at the Indian Multiplex.” In A. Moran and K. ­Aveyard (eds.) Watching Films: Cinema-Going, Audiences and Exhibition. Bristol: Intellect (pp. 369–86). Beach, E.R. (1932) “Double Features in Motion-Picture Exhibition.” Harvard Business Review 10 ( July 1932): 505–15. Bertrand, D. (1936) “Work Materials No 34: The Motion Picture Industry.” Office of National ­Recovery Administration, Division of Review, February 1936. Business Week (1938) “Double·Movie Scrap.” 5 March, p. 45. Chambers, R.W. (1938) “The Double Feature as Sales Problem.” Harvard Business Review 16 (Winter 1938): 226–36. Fuller-Seeley, K.H. (2007) “Dish Night at the Movies: Exhibitors and Female Audiences during the Great Depression.” In J. Lewis and E. Smoodin (eds.) Looking Past the Screen: Case Studies in American Film History and Method. Durham, NC: Duke University Press (pp. 246–275). Harrison’s Reports (1936) “The Inconsistencies of Producer Exhibitors on Double Features.” 24 ­October, p. 169. Hays, W.H. (1929) Letter to David Sarnoff, 23 September. MPPDA Digital Archive, Record #1492, frames 06-0636 - 06-0650 http://mppda.flinders.edu.au/records/1492 [Accessed 7 ­January 2017]. Hearings (1940) Hearing before the Committee on Interstate and Foreign Commerce, U.S. House of Representatives, 76th Congress, 3rd Session on S. 280, a Bill to Prohibit and to Prevent the Trade ­Practices Known as Compulsory Block Booking and Blind Selling in the Leasing of ­Motion-Picture Films in Interstate and Foreign Commerce. Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office. Huettig, M.D. (1944) Economic Control of the Motion Picture Industry; A Study in Industrial Organization. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press. Kinsky, J. (1937) “Go-to-the-Show-On-Time Drive Asked for Theatres.” Motion Picture Herald, 6 March, p. 93. Klenotic, J. (1998) “Class Markers in the Mass Movie Audience: A Case Study in the Cultural ­Geography of Moviegoing, 1926–1932.” The Communication Review 2(4): 461–95. Klenotic, J. (2001) “‘Like Nickels in a Slot’: Children of the American Working Classes at the ­Neighborhood Movie House.” The Velvet Light Trap: A Critical Journal of Film and Television 48: 20–33. Klenotic, J. (2007) “Four Hours of Hootin’ and Hollerin’: Moviegoing and Everyday Life Outside the Movie Palace.” In R. Maltby, M. Stokes and R.C. Allen (eds.) Going to the Movies: Hollywood and the Social Experience of Cinema. Exeter: University of Exeter Press (pp. 130–154). Maltby, R. (2013) “The Standard Exhibition Contract and the Unwritten History of the Classical Hollywood Cinema.” Film History 25(1–2): 138–153. Motion Picture Herald (1931a) “Divergent Independent Interests May Prevent Double Bill Relief.” 9 May, p. 13. Motion Picture Herald (1931b) “Spreading of Double Feature Alarms Leaders of Industry.” 14 ­November, pp. 9, 28. Motion Picture Herald (1933) “Double Featuring May Be Ended with Opening of the New Season.” July 8, p. 9 Motion Picture Herald (1934a) “Independents Planning Larger Feature Output.” 7 April, p. 9. Motion Picture Herald (1934b) “Exhibitors Do Something about Continuous Shows.” 5 May 5, pp. 10–11. Motion Picture Herald (1934c) “Exhibitors Appeal to Public to See Feature from Start.” 12 May, p. 17. Motion Picture Herald (1934d) “Newspapers Aid Theatre Plan.” 12 May, p. 29. Motion Picture Herald (1934e) “That Continuous Performance Double Bill Factor.” 19 May 19, pp. 25–6. Motion Picture Herald (1934f ) Letter to the Editor. 26 May, p. 22. Motion Picture Herald (1934g) “7,000 Theatres Double-Featuring, Declares Golden.” 29 December, p. 12. Motion Picture Herald (1937a) “Duals Gain Ground in Eight Key Cities.” 2 January, p. 18. Motion Picture Herald (1937b) “Calls Double Feature Octopus Strangling Quality and Receipts.” 13 February, p. 70.

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Richard Maltby Motion Picture Herald (1937c) “Companies Win Anti-Dual Ruling; Public Votes Against Practice.” 13 March, pp. 28, 30. Motion Picture Herald (1937d) “Distributors Can Fix Admissions, Court Holds.” 2 October, pp. 19–20. Motion Picture Herald (1937e) “1,000 in First of New Groups to Sponsor Boycotts of Dual Houses.” 2 October, p. 54. Motion Picture Herald (1940) “Goldwyn-Gallup Survey Reports 57% Against Duals, 43% In Favor.” 10 August, p. 21. Motion Picture Theatre Owners of America (1936) “Double Features: A Problem that Gets No Better Fast.” General Bulletin 26 September. MPPDA Digital Archive, Record#1137, frame 11–1155. http://mppda.flinders.edu.au/records/1137 [Accessed 6 January 2017]. Muscio, G. (1997) Hollywood’s New Deal. Culture and the Moving Image. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press. Mutual v Ohio (1915) Mutual Film Corp. v. Industrial Commission of Ohio, 236 U.S. 230. https:// supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/236/230/case.html [Accessed 6 January 2017]. Newsweek (1937) “Screen Fans Organize to Bite Hand That Feeds Them Double Features.” 4 October, p. 25. Nizer, L. (1935) New Courts of Industry: Self-Regulation under the Motion Picture Code. New York, NY: Longacre Press. Ohmer, S. (2006) George Gallup in Hollywood. New York, NY: Columbia University Press. Ohmer, S. (2007) “Speaking for the Audience: Double Features, Public Opinion, and the Struggle for Control in 1930s Hollywood.” Quarterly Review of Film and Video 24(2): 143–69. Palfreyman, D. (1935) “Trade Relations in the Motion Picture Industry,” internal Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America, Inc. report, September 1935. MPPDA Digital Archive, Flinders University Library Special Collections MPPDA Record#2530, frame 10-2397. http:// mppda.flinders.edu.au/records/2530 [Accessed 6 January 2017]. Palfreyman, D. (1938) memo to Will H. Hays, November 30, 1938, MPPDA Digital Archive, ­M PPDA Record#1181, frames 12-0480-81. http://mppda.flinders.edu.au/records/1181 [Accessed 6 January 2017]. Quigley, M. (1934) “The Public Be Damned” Motion Picture Herald. 21 April, p. 9. Schatz, T. (1997) Boom and Bust: American Cinema in the 1940s. New York, NY: Scribner’s. Skouras, S (1939) Letter to Darryl Zanuck, 17 January, MPPDA Digital Archive, MPPDA ­Record#1213, frames 12-2017. http://mppda.flinders.edu.au/records/1213 [Accessed 6 January 2017]. Variety (1935) “Chi Back to Double-Feature Vogue for New Season as Premiums Fade.” 19 June, p. 24. Variety (1937) “They Used to Vote Dry and Act Wet; Now Vote Singles But Buy Dual Pix.”, 7 April, p. 11. Variety (1940) “Jack Shea on Why Duals Do OK Biz.” 5 June, p. 7.

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14 “When in doubt, Showcase” The rise and fall of United Artists’ revolutionary New York distribution pattern Zoë Wallin

Writing in Variety in March 1960, Vincent Canby (1960a) drew attention to the major problem that Hollywood’s distributors had faced since the late 1950s, arguing that “the standard pattern” for film circulation in New York, “with the Broadway opening followed by a Brooklyn first run and then dates in the circuits … is no longer realistic in terms of today’s market.” Growing suburbanization had drained customers from the primary sites of their business in the large metropolitan centers. The traditional system of circulating films, based around profitable first-run venues in the central business districts of the major cities, was geographically ill-equipped to service this newly dispersed audience. The fact that this was a transitional period for the Hollywood industry has been well documented, but scholarship has largely focused on production and, to a lesser extent, exhibition. The distribution sector was also being recalibrated. The former run-zone-clearance circulation of the vertically integrated studio system had been upset by the US Supreme Court’s 1948 ruling requiring theater divestiture and outlawing of several profitable distribution practices now deemed “unfair.” In light of this attempt to loosen the studios’ stranglehold on exhibition, the majors’ retention of market control through distribution needed to be further secured. In 1962, United Artists launched a bold new method of circulating films in New York, called “premiere showcase.” This plan saw a new film simultaneously released into a small number of suburban and neighborhood theaters in the New York boroughs. Viewers would no longer need to travel to see a new film at the downtown premiere theatre on Broadway; advertising for the “showcase” plan centered on its being “first run in your neighbourhood” (Variety, 1962d). The development of different “showcase” theater networks and the variations to this original vision reveal how the major distributors and theater circuits amended aspects of their traditional distribution strategy to maintain a profitable system of release in the post-Paramount era. The subsequent reaction from various exhibitor groups demonstrates their continuing resistance to the major distributors’ regulation of product and market control. The development of “showcase” also presents a new picture of the period between the old system of tiered circulation and lengthy play-offs, and the extensive implementation of wide release and saturation bookings that occurred in the following decade. While distribution has now been accepted as central to the power of the Hollywood film industry (Maltby, 2003; Gomery, 2005), it remains a sorely under-researched area, even within new cinema history. This chapter suggests how the study of film 173

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distribution strategies and their implementation in the market illustrate the industry’s power dynamics and the relationship between the major and minor film companies, the large theater circuits, independent theater owners, labor unions, and the Department of Justice (DoJ). This more inclusive picture of the intricate workings of the industry can shed new light on both production and exhibition histories. New York City was the United States’ largest filmgoing market in the 1960s, as well as being the geographical home of the major film companies’ distribution arms and the place where the industry’s financing deals were arranged. Nevertheless, it had one of the most staid, conventional systems of theatrical circulation in the country. As the location where “showcase” first developed, and where many significant distribution precedents were trialed, New York remains a key starting point for exploring the development and diffusion of distribution strategies in the 1960s. Through an examination of the discourse of the trade press, and Variety in particular, this chapter illuminates how the “showcase” strategy bridged the industry’s transition from the distribution system of run-zone-clearance to that of wide saturation release.

The run-zone-clearance system The run-zone-clearance system was initially developed in the 1920s as a set of distribution practices to “protect” theaters from exhibiting the same picture at the same time (Lewis, 1933: 201). As film scholar David Waterman (2009: 9–10) explains, this method of staggered distribution was based on the principles of price discrimination and market segmentation. The system segmented consumers according to their willingness to pay different prices for product, maximizing profits from viewers willing to pay more to see a film earlier and in more luxurious surroundings. “Clearance,” the phased removal of films from the market, extended the product’s value by temporarily restricting customer access to the product. Under the run-zone-clearance system, markets were divided into geographical areas called zones, within which there was a hierarchy of theaters, each with an assigned status that was categorized in terms of “runs.” A picture would play initially at a first run house for a top or “hard” ticket price, where as a new product it would secure the largest profit. After a clearance period of several weeks when it was held off the market, the picture would then proceed to the second-run theaters in the zone. Following this pattern, the product would filter down to the subsequent runs as ticket prices decreased. Looking back from 1973, industry insider Richard Albarino (1973) described the traditional New York play-off as “fairly orderly, even after divorcement,” with three t­ ickle-down levels. The first were premiere runs, exclusive to the Broadway theaters, after which time the films were moved over to the second level, which was sometimes called the “firstrun” [sic] in New York. The second-run consisted of the neighborhood theaters in the boroughs, usually playing the film for three to four days in a double bill, while subsequent runs at the ­lower-level theaters “mopped up”. The play-off of Queen Christina (MGM, 1933) (­Figure 14.1) illustrates a fairly typical run-zone-clearance release of an A product in New York from the height of the studio system. The pyramid shape illustrates the product’s concentration in a single venue upon its release, before it gradually opens wider in a larger number of screens but for shorter stretches of time. The run-zone-clearance structure enabled distributors to control the flow of films to audiences. The large theater circuits and those owned by or affiliated with the major studios were at the top of the pyramid and would receive the best product quickly, while access by small chains and independent theaters was restricted. While the former group was often sold 174

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FIRST-RUN Astor Theatre 6 weeks $1.10-$1.65-$2.20

CLEARANCE: 2 weeks SECOND-RUN Capitol (Manhattan) - 2 weeks 35-75-85-$1.10 Metropolitan (Brooklyn) - 1 week 25-35-50 CLEARANCE: 2 weeks THIRD-RUN Leow’s Bay Ridge theatre, Loew’s Alpine theatre - 4 days CLEARANCE: 2 weeks FOURTH-RUN Leow’s Breevort, Loew’s Century, RKO’s Shore Road, and Century Marine and Centiry Midwood theatres - 4 days CLEARANCE: 1 WEEK FIFTH-RUN Century Albermarine and Coney Island theatres - 4 days SIXTH-RUN Apollo Theatre (independent), 4 days

Figure 14.1  The typical run-zone-clearance release of Queen Christina (MGM, 1933)1

films individually on a percentage basis, the smaller exhibitors were bound by the Standard Exhibition Contract and usually bought the product in bulk and sight unseen, in practices known as block booking and blind bidding (Maltby, 2013). As Mae D. Huettig (1985: 295) described in 1944, the major studios’ ownership of the majority of first-run metropolitan theaters, where most box office profits were made, contributed to their ability to govern access to the screen. Thomas Schatz (1999: 13) records that although the majors held only 15 percent of the nation’s theaters in 1940, this represented 80 percent of all metropolitan first-run theaters, while the more numerous independent theaters and small chains were systematically relegated to weaker and less profitable spaces in the market. The theater circuits owned by the majors were largely concentrated in different regional areas, with Loew’s dominating the New York area and Balaban and Katz (Paramount) reigning over Chicago and the Midwest, for example. To ensure that their exhibitors would have a steady flow of product, the studios had mutual agreements to exhibit each other’s output in their own theaters. They also used their cinemas as security to raise investment for production, and to minimize risk by providing a guaranteed market for their output while keeping the transactional costs of distribution low and their theaters fully utilized (Gomery, 2005: 17–18). 175

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Film historian Chris Cagle (2016: 25) describes this tightly controlled system as constituting a horizontal oligopoly and vertical monopoly. The system had been formally codified in 1933 with the Code of Fair Competition issued by the National Recovery Administration (NRA) (Nizer, 1935), but in 1935 the Supreme Court invalidated the NRA and the ­Roosevelt administration began an anti-trust crusade against the nation’s major industries, including Hollywood. While the film industry’s disputes had previously been resolved through internal arbitration, the growing litigation from independent exhibitors over trade practices led to a suit filed by the DoJ on their behalf in 1938, and known as the Paramount suit after its first-named defendant. Although the trial was scheduled for May, 1940, a threeyear consent decree limiting block booking and blind bidding was negotiated. Sidelined by the Second World War, the suit against the majors was reopened in 1946. The steady decline in theater attendance from the late 1940s was tied to shifts in demographics, including the baby boom, suburbanization, increased consumer spending, a shorter working week, and a wider variety of leisure activities on offer. The trades declared that the public had lost the moviegoing habit and grown increasingly selective in their choice of films to see (Variety, 1956a). At the same time, the government’s investigation of the industry’s trade practices came to a head in United States v. Paramount Pictures, Inc. In 1948, the Supreme Court’s anti-trust decision found that although there was no monopoly in the production of films, the major Hollywood companies had discriminated in favor of their affiliated theater circuits and large independent theater chains (“Highlights of the Anti-Trust Decision,” 1948). In mandating the studios’ divestment of their theaters, the court sought to break up the system of vertical integration and open exhibition to greater competition. It further ruled that distribution practices such as blind bidding constituted illegal restraints of trade. Consent decrees for the major studios were rolled out across the 1950s. Motion Picture Herald (1951: 1) explained that Twentieth Century Fox’s consent decree prohibited Fox: from minimum price-fixing, maintaining a system of clearances by agreement with exhibitors or distributors, granting or enforcing unreasonable clearance in such cases, carrying out any franchise, master agreement or formula deals, block booking, or licensing any film other than “theatre by theatre, solely upon the merits and without discrimination in favour of affiliated theatres, circuit theatres or others.” The Supreme Court’s ruling against unreasonable clearances completely disrupted the run-zoneclearance system. Smaller exhibitors who had subsisted on stale product at the bottom rungs of the ladder now sought to move up to a higher run. This resulted in what the industry termed “multiple runs,” where a number of theaters in the same area would play the same product at the same time. This situation rapidly met criticism from exhibitors as well as from distributors who felt that without the staggered distribution system, a film would circulate and exit the market in only a matter of weeks (Variety, 1952a, 1953). In 1952 MGM head Nick Schenck argued in Variety (1952b) that this could cause viewers to miss out, reducing the overall returns on a film: There is just so much money to be gotten from one zone. When you have a series of simultaneous runs you achieve nothing but a dilution of the boxoffice [sic] potential. No theatre makes any big money and it costs the distributor twice as much, and more, for his participation in a selling campaign to try to bolster business of the theaters. A trade article from 1955 further described how the role of the studio distribution heads in this era increasingly concentrated on extracting greater earnings from a smaller number 176

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of big budget pictures through large-scale marketing campaigns (Variety, 1955). A system of roadshow circulation was commonly utilized for this type of blockbuster product (Hall and Neale, 2010: 88–111). Travelling to large metropolitan centers before being released into the general first runs, roadshows brought additional revenue to studios in the form of raised admissions and extended plays (Motion Picture Herald, 1957d, 1957e). While many high-­ profile blockbusters were playing to extended business in the picture palaces, distributors recognized the need for an alternative distribution path for the remaining product. Although expensive publicity pushes were still built around the film’s premiere and first run, the audience’s dispersal into the suburbs required a new strategy to ensure that this advertising expenditure was better utilized. As the neighborhood houses and drive-ins increasingly encroached on the territory of the downtown theaters in the late 1950s, a spate of medium-budget releases bypassed the first-run houses altogether (Hollinger, 1958). Over the next few years, there was a concerted movement to downsize many of the picture palaces and the trade press predicted that big theaters in suburban locations would be a dominant new feature of the exhibition field, as an increasing number of deals were arranged between suburban shopping centers and “hard top” brick and mortar theaters (Motion Picture Herald, 1957b; Variety, 1959a). In the 1960s, shopping centers grew as key sites for new cinemas, providing the advantages of ease of access, high foot traffic and parking space. Variety reported that two out of three theater constructions, particularly those of newly developed circuits, were in shopping center sites (Murphy, 1965).

The development of “showcase” For several years, trade commentators such as Vincent Canby (1960b) had pointed to the need for an overhaul of New York’s rigid distribution system, which still adhered to the staggered run-zone-clearance pattern. In 1960, Broadway theaters had begun to open their firstrun product “day-and-date” with smaller art house theaters on Manhattan’s east side. Variety argued that this could be the wedge needed for a departure from “the standard Broadway to Brooklyn to circuit break playoff” (Variety, 1960). The trade paper quoted an anonymous distributor who anticipated the challenges of disrupting the current clearance pattern and potentially losing the prestige benefits of the Broadway premiere: “You might simply end up with what is now known as the ‘saturation’ opening which in New York is usually reserved for the exploitation type of picture.” Nonetheless, in 1962 United Artists, which had always

FIRST-RUN Thirteen theatres across the five NY boroughs: three weeks CLEARANCE: ONE WEEK SECOND-RUN Sixty-seven theatres across greater New York: two weeks minimum Figure 14.2  U  nited Artists’ “premiere showcase” plan for The Road to Hong Kong (United Artists, 1962)

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primarily been a distribution company that utilized the other majors’ affiliated theaters and circuits to release their product, launched a new release pattern. The “premiere showcase” plan was developed by United Artists’ vice president and former Loew’s executive Eugene Picker, who drew on his own experience working on Duel in the Sun’s saturation strategy sixteen years earlier. Picker’s initial design was to treat the vast New York area as several separate regions, with quality pictures playing at raised prices at a select group of second-run houses in each borough, “bringing the first-run [sic] closer to the New York public” (Variety, 1972a; Albarino, 1973). The first film to receive “premiere showcase” treatment was The Road to Hong Kong (United Artists, 1962) in late June 1962. The film opened in thirteen theaters across the New York boroughs, including a drive-in theater in Westchester (Variety, 1962b). Four weeks after the first run, the film was released in a second wave to approximately seventy theaters across greater New York (Variety, 1962f ). Figure 14.2 illustrates how “showcase” release differed from the run-zone-clearance system’s pyramid form, removing the single premiere run and reducing the number of tiers through which the product moved. The Road to Hong Kong made $135,001 in its first five days and its gross totaled approximately $334,000 after three weeks of screenings (Variety, 1962e). The admission prices in the smaller, largely independent theaters selected by United Artists were higher than usual, consistent with the first run status of the product. Promotion for The Road to Hong Kong utilized local and community networks, as well as radio ads and a tie-in with Macy’s department stores with the theme, “Movies are moving closer to you … just the way Macy’s did” (Variety, 1962c). Given this box office success and quick turnaround of profit, United Artists decided to release The Bird Man of Alcatraz (United Artists, 1962) via “premiere showcase” in mid-July, less than a month after the plan first launched. In August Universal also experimented with “showcase,” booking Spiral Road (Universal, 1962) in a network of 22 theaters across New York City, upstate New York and New Jersey. Nine cinemas played the film simultaneously with the Broadway premiere, with the remaining theaters joining over a two-week period. In contrast to United Artist’s publicity focus on neighborhood first runs; however, Universal’s advertising concentrated on the Broadway screening (Variety, 1962g). In August, United Artists trialed a variation on “premiere showcase” outside New York, day-and-­d ating the ­release of Kid Galahad (United Artists, 1962), starring Elvis Presley, across multiple neighborhood theaters in Atlanta, Baltimore, Indianapolis and Pittsburgh (Variety, 1962h). As Shelden Hall has described, Elvis pictures had their own history of unique distribution that dated back to 1957. Referred to as the “Presley pattern,” the films were frequently ­released directly to the target audience of teenagers via drive-ins and subsequent runs, as such “mass-appeal pictures … had little to gain from an expensive premiere run in a city-center showcase” (Hall, 2012: 351). In early 1963, Twentieth Century Fox became the first of the majors to instigate a “premiere showcase” release. In distributing Sodom and Gomorrah (Twentieth Century Fox, 1963) the company aimed for 700 play-dates in the first month of release, day-and-dating the Broadway first run with up to seventeen theaters in New York, including some in the circuit that had been established by United Artists. Columbia also began experimenting with “premiere showcase,” and Universal continued its so-called “perimeter plan,” a variation on “showcase” that opened wider and utilized larger theater circuits in three waves of release (Variety, 1963b) (See Figure 14.3). In mid-1963, United Artists contributed a further development of the “premiere showcase” pattern for the release of Irma La Douce (United Artists, 1963). Rather than being released to multiple houses for its initial run, in this case the film had already had its first run at Broadway’s DeMille theater. It then moved over to 178

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FIRST-RUN

Radio City Music Hall - 4 weeks SECOND-RUN

Thirty theatres across New York (‘perimeter wave’) - 4 weeks THIRD-RUN

Seventy-five circuit theatres - 2 weeks MOP-UP RUN

Eighty-five theatres - 1 week

Figure 14.3  Universal’s “perimeter plan” for To Kill a Mockingbird (Universal, 1963) also incorporated a Broadway first run

Manhattan’s Victoria Theatre and opened in an estimated 25 houses in the New York area. Labeled the “golden showcase,” Variety concluded, “this, then, now looks like the pattern to be followed by UA with future non-roadshow but Broadway daydate firstrun [sic] product” (Variety, 1963d, 1963e, 1963g). Twentieth Century Fox’s release of The Lion (Twentieth Century Fox, 1963) a few months earlier had followed a similar model, entering a “showcase” circuit only after it had played a premiere run on Broadway (Variety, 1963a). With the inclusion of a single first run, this version of “showcase” began to revert to a broader version of the run-zone-clearance system’s hierarchical structure. The effectiveness of United Artists’ “showcase” system was initially limited by the absence of any RKO or Loew’s Theatre circuits within its network, and therefore by its inability to use the highest quality theaters in the selected areas. These circuits were opposed to “showcase,” and when The Road to Hong Kong opened in June both Loew’s and RKO ran competitive ad campaigns for their own New York screenings that week, emphasizing the availability of their first run product. Early the following year, however, when the system had run profitably for six months and the other distribution companies had joined in, the previously reluctant theater circuits agreed to participate. In January 1964, Universal adopted “golden showcase” for its release of Charade (Universal, 1964), with the inclusion of the RKO circuit in its theater network. At the same time Paramount utilized the Loew’s circuit for Love with the Proper Stranger (Paramount, 1964), while Warner Bros. began developing its own plans with RKO (Kalish, 1963a, 1963b; Variety, 1963j, 1963k, 1964a, 1964b, 1964c). With the increased participation of the studios threatening to clog the established “showcase” pipeline, distributors developed several release patterns using different theater networks, such as the “Hollywood showcase” track of 23 RKO-Skouras theaters (Variety, 1964m). By 1969, there were seven different “showcase” networks for the New York area, including two dedicated to art house films (Variety, 1969). Looking back after a year of “showcase,” Variety wrote: “it’s a saturation plan that makes first run houses out of many theaters simultaneously and, except for holdovers, is a quick kill system if the picture is right for this type of booking” (Variety, 1963c). As well as enabling a faster return of profits and a more economical advertising strategy, United Artists executives insisted that “showcase” had not damaged first run Broadway grosses: “It isn’t a question, then, of “syphoning off” grosses from Broadway by going day-date around the city; rather the plan has had the effect of attracting patrons who were not going to the Broadway 179

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outlet anyway” (Canby, 1962). Industry commentator Robert J. Landry (1964) similarly concluded that “showcase” greatly improved the distributor return in New York through the sharing of opening and exploitation costs, and estimated that it had raised the market yield by 40 percent over prior average earnings. More widely, the summer of 1964 was a turning point for the industry after a long period of decline: there was an 11 percent rise in attendance across the country, positive business reports were issued by the studios, theater construction was increasing, and a raft of positive press stories and general good will was directed towards the industry (Motion Picture Herald, 1964).

Resistance to “showcase”: “first run” loses its meaning “Showcase” was not without its detractors, however. In a conference held by the Allied States Association of Motion Picture Exhibitors in late 1963, the independent theater owners represented by that organization extensively debated the new distribution development. While some argued that it was creating an alternative “third circuit” that could enable smaller theaters to compete with the major chains, it was rightly anticipated that the strategy would soon be adopted and absorbed by the circuits (Variety, 1963e). The implementation of “showcase” in the marketplace illustrates the divisions that existed between different types of exhibitors. The evolution of the exhibitor groups’ responses to the distribution strategy over the course of the 1960s further suggests the way in which the distributors were able to resurrect their favorable relationships with the large theater circuits at the expense of the independent theaters, which resulted in renewed calls of an unfair trade “conspiracy.” When United Artists initially launched “premiere showcase” through a network of largely independent theaters and small chains, Allied States viewed the plan positively, since its continuous playoff would allow “the subruns to benefit from the firstrun [sic] advertising, publicity and exploitation” (Variety, 1962d). In the same article, the Theatre Owners of America, which represented many of the larger circuits including New York-based Loew’s and RKO, commented that the plan would cause the ticket prices of neighborhood theaters to rise, but was otherwise non-committal on the subject. But as the large circuits changed their stance in 1964 and began to participate in “showcase” circulation, the complaints of independent theaters increased. An early debate over the status of participating “showcase” theaters was raised in a labor dispute between exhibitors and Brooklyn’s Local 306 projectionist’s union, represented by the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees. Distributors such as United Artists deemed “showcase” theaters to be automatically considered “first run,” although many participating venues traditionally held a second- or subsequent-run status. Local 306 argued that if these theaters were raised to a first run level, the union rule required them to employ more projectionists, who were also entitled to a higher pay rate. The theater organizations reluctantly conceded to the union’s demands, but it was agreed that the venues would revert to their regular subsequent-run status when they were not exhibiting a “showcase” film (Variety, 1963f ). This fluidity of movement between exhibition status raised further issues for filmgoers who felt that the too-frequent use of “showcase” had led to a dilution of its publicity and prestige value. Complaints about the “showcase” term being misapplied were voiced in the following year, as certain theaters continued to advertise “showcase” for all product and charge a higher admission price (Variety, 1964p). The major opposition to “showcase” came from the early supporters of the plan, the independent exhibitor organizations. Meyer Ackerman of Allied States had cautioned his fellow exhibitors in late 1963, arguing that the 180

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strategy would create more problems than it would solve; he pointed out that the underlying principle was for a smaller number of theaters to play longer runs of the film, which would exacerbate the already unsteady flow of films. At the same time, admission prices would rise and potentially alienate customers, while the deals set by distributors had high rental terms and employed blind booking and a “no adjustment” policy (Variety, 1963h). The independents’ resistance to “showcase” strengthened in 1964 once the major circuits came on board. New York’s Independent Theatres of America (ITOA) complained that the distributors favored the theaters and circuits with greater buying power over the independents, asserting that the manner of selection was “arbitrary, unfair, discriminatory and illegal” (Variety, 1964e). The rental terms and methods of blind buying and bidding were also held to be unjust by ITOA, which saw the modification of the clearance system as a “conspiracy” between the distributors and the exhibition circuits that benefitted from adjusted rates for rentals and advertising expenses (Variety, 1964f ). The organization drafted its opposition to the scheme in a paper that was sent to all the major studio heads as well as to the DoJ. Even Local 306, which had previously been at loggerheads with ITOA over “showcase” exhibition terms, lent their support, pointing to the recent closure of 35 New York neighborhood theaters as evidence of the effect that “showcase” was having on exhibition (Kalish, 1964). Harry Brandt, the president of ITOA and manager of Manhattan’s Beacon Theatre, had been one of the first participants in “premiere showcase” with The Road to Hong Kong, but now led ITOA’s campaign against it. After the DoJ replied that it found “nothing inherently illegal” in licensing pictures for first run exhibition in a substantial number of theaters, Brandt took it to the courts. In May 1964 he sued four distributors and four theater circuits in a treble damage suit for $1,050,000, plus temporary and permanent injunctions (Variety, 1964q, 1964r). He alleged that the chains received product with clearance over other theaters and those further unnecessary clearances were given to houses that were not competing with each other. Brandt argued that this defied the terms of the consent decrees signed in the wake of the Paramount decision and amounted to a conspiracy to monopolize first-run exhibition. The same year, owners of Broadway’s New Amsterdam Theatre filed a similar suit against the distributors for deliberately excluding certain theaters from “showcase” (Variety, 1964s). In November, a counter-claim was launched by one of the circuits, Skouras Theatres, against Brandt’s company, with a cross-claim against an additional number of major studios and theaters added to the charge. Skouras Theatres argued that to obtain a theatrical license for “showcase” pictures, they would be forced to participate in an unlawful arrangement or be relegated to a subsequent run, with the defendants having imposed an arbitrary system of clearances and runs on the theaters (Variety, 1964t). There is no record in the trade press of the outcome of these suits, which were probably either dropped or settled out of court. As the “showcase” strategy spread to different cities in 1964, so did the opposition. ­Chicago, home to a particularly strong branch of the Allied States organization and to theaters with a long history of battling the majors on anti-trust issues, was especially vocal in its opposition. An early report on the Chicago trailing of a “showcase” system in 1964 described how Move over Darling (Twentieth Century Fox, 1963) played in twelve neighborhood and local theaters with apparent success. While the neighborhood network’s exhibition outgrossed the first runs’ box office in the same period and Variety concluded that “main stem biz seemed little affected by the bypass,” the majority of industry commentators delayed their judgment until the effect of a series of “showcase” releases could be measured (Variety, 1964d). Not long after, local exhibitors noted that the admission price for top pictures had risen from 90c to $1.25 while distributors still secured up to 85 percent of the city’s total grosses through its first-run theater networks (Roth, 1964). Harry Nepo of the Independent 181

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Theatres of Illinois and Jack Clark of Allied Theatres of Illinois took their individual complaints to the DoJ, arguing that “showcase” created a system of “poverty in the midst of plenty” (Variety, 1964k, 1964n). Nepo pointed to the distributor-stipulated playing time of films under “showcase,” with the theaters required to “showcase” product for a minimum of 43 out of the previous 60 weeks. This, he argued, severely restricted the product supply to 80 or so other theaters in the area that were not part of the network and had limited access to films. Allied Theatres further condemned the system as benefitting distributors and enabling them to push higher terms on exhibitors through clauses for minimum playing time and clearance requirements. Clark (quoted in Roth, 1964: 17) argued that we shall be faced with quality theatres passing quality pictures because they are tied up with long runs of “hypoed” mediocre pictures. The other side of the coin shows many top flight productions appearing in sub-standard theatres just to pick up a playdate in that area. Despite the continuance of damage suits instigated by theaters over the next few years, the exhibitors’ charges and complaints went largely unrecognized by the courts, the DoJ and the distributors (Variety, 1966, 1973a). “Showcase” continued to be widely adopted across the country over the rest of the decade and became the default means of release in the New York market in the 1970s (Variety, 1976). The “showcase” distribution patterns of the 1970s were, however, far removed from the original design. Even as little as a year after United Artists launched “premiere showcase” as a model for neighborhood first runs, the strategy began to develop into a system for releasing films in multiple theaters after the picture had its initial run on Broadway: [I]nstead of primarily being the firstrun [sic] multiple plan it started out to be, it had now become merely a high-toned limited multiple followup [sic] to the first run engagement. … Slowly, the pattern is drifting back to the traditional patterns of the past. (Variety, 1964m) This development raises the question of what separates “showcase” from the pattern of multiple runs that proliferated after the consent decree’s revision of the run-zone-clearance system. Multiple runs in subsequent and neighborhood theaters had led to a faster play-off for films. The system of “showcase” similarly enacted a form of saturation, but it sought to escape the prior association with low-budget product, and the distributors reaped the rewards at the expense of the exhibitors. Over time, even this association between saturation and higher quality films soon began to wear off. By the 1970s, “showcase” was perceived as a dump for poorer product that required a fast playoff before negative word of mouth could take effect. While the trades felt that pictures were often lost in “showcase,” the distributors’ motto had now reportedly become “when in doubt, showcase,” and viewers complained that it was simply a pretense to raise admission prices (Variety, 1972a, 1972b, 1973b). In 1964, trade writer Martin Quigley Jr. (1964: 6) argued: Theoretically the idea of Showcase exhibition is a logical – even inevitable – d­ evelopment. The growth of our larger cities into metropolitan centers has created conditions which cry out for changes in the method of distributing pictures. A significant number of potential patrons cannot be expected to journey to the center of the city to attend a first run. Also newspaper and television advertising costs are so high that some kind of a multiple first run seems justified for many pictures … Showcase should mean something 182

When in doubt, Showcase

more than a saturation booking. Certainly all pictures should not be roadshown and equally certain [sic] all pictures should not be shown in the maximum number of theatres simultaneously. Quigley identified that the central problem of “showcase” lay in its attempt to reconcile into a single distribution pipeline product that was designed for different purposes and audiences that possessed different perceptions of value. Distribution became increasingly standardized in the late 1970s, alongside the growing dominance of an exhibition sector that could accommodate the different product streams and market segments in one location, the multiplex. “Showcase” practices paved the way for the diffusion of saturation distribution in the 1970s, particularly the method of synchronizing releases nationally, then quickly widening the number of theaters to utilize the initial publicity push. As Hall and Neale (2010: 211) note, Jaws (Universal, 1975) was not the first film to be given a wide saturation release, nor the subject of the first national television campaign, but it was the most financially successful use of the distribution and release strategies that had been developed in the previous decades, with “showcase” prominent among them (Figure 14.4). The theatrical system of release has more recently been upturned, from the trickle-down triangle of the run-zone-clearance system to an inverted pattern where films are generally released in the largest number of screens before the amount gradually subsides (see Figure 14.5). After the number of screens has dropped off, the film is removed from the theatrical market and proceeds to other forms of non-theatrical exhibition, including subscription video on demand, cable television, DVD and Blu-ray and broadcast television. The removal of strict clearance periods in theatrical exhibition has seen the transference of staggered distribution to the wider system of exhibition that includes ancillary markets, which still maintain a clearance window between each platform. FIRST-RUN: 464 theatres (North America), 10 days SECOND RUN: 954 theatres, 8 weeks THIRD-RUN: 2,460 theatres, 23 weeks

Figure 14.4  The wide release of Jaws (Universal, 1975) across North America

OPENING: 5,508 theatres across North America: two weeks 3,166 theatres: one week 2,841 theatres: one week 2,381 theatres: one week 1,602 theatres: one week 652 theatres: one week 266 theatres: one week 295 theatres: one week 256 theatres: one week 206 theatres: one week

Figure 14.5  The North American release of Central Intelligence (New Line/Universal, 2016)

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“Showcase” illustrates one of the strategies developed by the distributors to adapt to the shifts in audience consumption and geographical spread. At the same time, the evolution of “showcase” from its original inception saw the majors realign themselves with the large theater circuits while reinstituting some of the trade practices that had been deemed “unfair” by the US Supreme Court in 1948. The “showcase” pattern eroded previous assumptions about prestige and first-run status, but profitable aspects of the former distribution system crept back in. The long-term result of “showcase” was to introduce a new fluidity to the circulation patterns of greater New York and other metropolitan areas, which recognized the need to expand and de-centralize their first run in order to reach a larger market. In slowly moving away from the theatrical run-zone-clearance system in a non-linear, two-steps-forward-one-step-back progression, “showcase” paved the way for the large-scale adoption of wide release saturation strategies in the following decades and the system of theatrical exhibition that persists today.

Note 1 Sources for Figure 14.1, Queen Christina: New York Sun (1933), 26 December, p. 17. Brooklyn Daily Eagle (1933), 31 December, p. 11. Albany Evening News (1934), 3 February, p. 6. Utica Daily Press (1934), 3 February, p. 4. Troy Times (1934), 10 February, p. 7. The Morning Herald, Gloversville and Johnstown, NY (1934), 17 February, p. 2. Buffalo Courier Gazette (1934), 23 February, p. 16. Dickstein, M. (1934) Brooklyn Daily Eagle, 3 March, p. 9. Brooklyn Daily Eagle (1934), 30 March, p. 7. Brooklyn Daily Eagle (1934), 15 April, p. 28. Brooklyn Daily Eagle (1934), 27 April, p. 30. Brooklyn Daily Eagle (1934), 1 May, p. 13. Schenectady Gazette (1934), 3 October, p. 14. Schenectady Gazette (1934), 21 November, p. 14.

References Albarino, R. (1973) “‘Showcase’ Architect Groaning; Eugene Picker: Abused, Misused.” Variety 12 September, pp. 5, 21. Box Office Mojo (2016). Central Intelligence [Website]. Available: www.boxofficemojo.com/­movies/?p age=weekly&id=centralintelligence.htm [Accessed 29 November 2018] Cagle, C. (2016) Sociology on Film: Postwar Hollywood’s Prestige Commodity. New Brunswick, NJ: ­Rutgers University Press. Canby, V. (1960a) “New York’s ‘Old Thinking’ Rut: Rigid Patterns Need Revision?” Variety 2 March, pp. 7, 20. Canby, V. (1960b) “Long-Runs Jam N.Y.C. Arties; 15-to-20 Films Await Dates; Curse of New ‘East Side Myth.’” Variety 16 March, pp. 7, 79. Canby, V. (1962) “UA: Format Maker and Breaker; Showcase Lesson Coming Clearer.” Variety 10 October, pp. 5, 14. Conant, M. (1960) Antitrust in the Motion Picture Industry. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Crowther, B. (1964) “New York’s Movie ‘Showcases’: 2-Year Exercise in Frustration.” New York Times 6 July. Gomery, D. (2005) The Hollywood Studio System: A History. London: British Film Institute. Hall, S. (2012) “Ozoners, Roadshows and Blitz Exhibitionism: Post-War Developments in Distribution and Exhibition.” In S. Neale (ed.), The Classical Hollywood Reader. New York, NY: Routledge (pp. 343–353). Hall, S. and Neale, S. (2010) Epics, Spectacles, and Blockbusters: A Hollywood History. Wayne, MI: Wayne State University Press. Hift. F. (1956) “‘Films’ B.O. Rainbow in Suburbs.” Variety 1 August, pp. 1, 18. Hollinger, H. (1958) “Nabe Openings Soon Forgot.” Variety 7 May, p. 13. Huettig, M.D. (1985) “Economic Control of the Motion Picture Industry. A Study in Industrial ­Organization.” In T. Balio (ed.), The American Film Industry; Revised Edition. Madison, WI: ­University of Wisconsin Madison Press (pp. 285–310). Kalish, E. (1963a) “Downtown in the Suburbs: Seek ‘First Run’ Pay in Booths.” Variety 18 September, p. 3.

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When in doubt, Showcase Kalish, E. (1963b) “Anyone Else for ‘Showcase’? Tradesters Not Very Confiding.” Variety 11 December, pp. 3, 53. Kalish, E. (1964) “Yearn to Smash ‘Showcases’; 206 Joins ITOA in Justice Rap.” Variety 25 March, p. 5. Landry, L. (1964) “Some Eyes are Upon Texas.” Variety 5 February, p. 5. Lewis, H.T. (1933) The Motion Picture Industry. New York: D. Van Nostrand. Maltby, R. (2003) Hollywood Cinema. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing. Maltby, R. (2013) “The Standard Exhibition Contract and the Unwritten History of the Classical Hollywood Cinema.” Film History: An International Journal 25(1): 138–153. Motion Picture Herald (1949) “‘One Punch’ Openings and Theatres.” 6 August, p. 12. Motion Picture Herald (1951) “Decree Gives 20th-Fox Two Years for Divorce.” 4 June, pp. 1, 2. Motion Picture Herald (1957a) “‘Ten Commandments’ Sets a New Pattern.” 2 February, p. 18. Motion Picture Herald (1957b) “Big Film Theatres in the Suburbs Seen Pattern of the Future.” 9 March, p. 17. Motion Picture Herald (1957c) “Mass Territorial Premieres Setting New Pattern of Distribution.” 6 July, p. 14. Motion Picture Herald (1957d) “Multiple Bookings Setting New Pattern.” 20 July, p. 14. Motion Picture Herald (1957e) “Multiple Bookings Hold Spotlight as Effective Distribution Pattern.” 28 September, p. 11. Motion Picture Herald (1964) “Flood Tide for Films.” 8 July, p. 4. Murphy, D. (1965) “Shopping Centres Seen a ‘Natural’ But Warn They Do Not Assure Profit.” ­Variety, 17 November, p. 15. Nizer, L. (1935). New Courts of Industry: Self-Regulation under the Motion Picture Code. New York, NY: Longacre Press. Quigley, Jr. M. (1964) “New Looks and Showcase.” Motion Picture Herald 24 June, p. 6. Roth, M. (1964) “Allied of Illinois Stones ‘Showcase’: Large Gross Benefits Only Distributor.” Variety 19 February, p. 17. Schatz, T. (1999) Boom and Bust: American Cinema in the 1940s (Vol. 6). Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Schatz, T (2012) “Hollywood: The Triumph of the Studio System.” In S. Neale (ed.), The Classical Hollywood Reader. New York, NY: Routledge (pp. 167–177). Variety (1947a) “Ingenious Film Booking Ideas, Shorter Runs, Relieve B’way First Run Pile- Ups.” 9 April, pp. 3, 20. Variety (1947b) “Majors Wary of Blitz Booking.” 11 June, pp. 5, 21. Variety (1948) “Highlights of the Anti-Trust Decision.” 5 May, p. 3. Variety (1949) “Disney’s Blitz Preem for ‘Heart’.” 2 February, p. 5. Variety (1952a) “B.O. Lag Has 3 Common Factors.” 27 February, p. 5. Variety (1952b) “Nick Schenck Calls Multiple-Runs Top Hazard.” 13 August, pp. 3, 18. Variety (1953) “Quick Playoffs Cost Millions; But No Way to Halt Waste.” 8 April, pp. 3, 20. Variety (1955) “Global Role of Sales Chiefs.” 2 March, pp. 5, 69. Variety (1956a) “More Data about Audience Taste? Great! But How Does East Get Studios to Act on Finding?” 23 May, pp. 5, 16. Variety (1956b) “‘Commandments’ Initial Playdates.” 18 April, p. 16. Variety (1957a) “Scuttling of Playdate System by Print Shortage Reaches Crisis.” 26 June, p. 4. Variety (1957b) “One Present Pace & Comparative Data Par Sees ‘Commandments’ Gross Sure to Tally $50,000,000 to $60,000,000.” 10 July, p. 14. Variety (1958) “Precedential Policy Certain to Echo as Others Follow ‘Ten Commandments.’” 14 May, p. 5. Variety (1959a) “Shopping Centre and Pix Pals.” 11 March, p. 5. Variety (1959b) “‘Hercules’ Throws Bolts in New England: Marshalling 115 Prints to Saturate.” 10 June, p. 19. Variety (1959c) “Hercules Has 6,000 Dates Lined Up.” 15 July, p. 32. Variety (1960) “Risky It May Be But ‘Showcasing’ on Broadway Looks Sure to Continue.” 31 August, p. 20. Variety (1962a) “United Artists Breaking Classic Manhattan Firstrun Clearances with ‘Dream’ and ‘Hong Kong.’ 16 May, p. 3, 11. Variety (1962b) “UA’s ‘Premiere Showcase’ Promises 21,560 Viewers.” 13 June, p. 5. Variety (1962c) “U.A’s ‘Road to’ L.I. Saturation.” 13 June, p. 13. Variety (1962d) “‘Premiere Showcase’ for Paris, too: Loew’s and RKO Counter with Own ‘First Run’ Ad Blasts in New York.” 27 June, p. 13. Variety (1962e) “UA’s ‘Showcase’ off and Running; Is It Historic?” 4 July p. 7. Variety (1962f ) “United Artists First Three-Week Test of Premiere Showcase; $334,000.” 18 July, p. 3.

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Zoë Wallin Variety (1962g) “U, Too, Breaks NY Pattern.” 1 August, p. 7. Variety (1962h) “Repeat ‘Premiere Showcase’ Pattern.” 15 August, p. 3. Variety (1962j) “Pittsburgh Dissenter as United Artists Applies Showcase Format There.” 3 October, p. 18. Variety (1963a) “‘Premiere Showcase’ Works for Films Which Already Played off on B’way.” 6 March, p. 13. Variety (1963b) “Changing Playoff Experiences; Perimeter Plan Seen Perking.” 19 June, p. 19 Variety (1963c) “Full Year of UA ‘Premiere Showcasing’ Auspices Sanguine Despite Detractors.” 3 July, p. 3. Variety (1963d) “For That Strutty ‘Irma La Douce’ UA Arranges a Golden Showcase.” 24 July, p. 18. Variety (1963e) “‘Golden Showcase’s’ 25; Plan a Second-First Run for UA’s Own ‘La Douce.’” 7 ­August, p. 11. Variety (1963f ) “What is a ‘First Run’? Local 306, Exhibs Clash on Multiple Breaks.” 11 September, pp. 3, 26. Variety (1963g) “U.A’s Next for ‘Golden’ Plan: ‘Great Escape.’” 25 September, p. 5. Variety (1963h) “Put an X-Ray on ‘Showcase’: United Artists Ducks Clinic.” 30 October, pp. 11, 21. Variety (1963j) “Arthur Tolchin: ‘Lowe’s Theatres Not Making with Showcase Experiments.’” 6 ­November, p. 3. Variety (1963k) “RKO-Warners Expected to ‘Showcase’; UA, Itself Jilted, Eyes RKO & Loew’s.” 18 December, p. 4. Variety (1964a) “Universal Sets a ‘Golden Showcase.’” 15 January, p. 5. Variety (1964b) “Any Can Play ‘Showcase’; Universal In, Others Coming.” 22 January, p. 5. Variety (1964c) “Par Takes Turn at Showcase Bat with ‘Stranger’ Via 2 Firstruns and Then a 20-Theatre Expansion.” 29 January, p. 5. Variety (1964d) “Chicago’s ‘Showcase Fever.’” 29 January, p. 7. Variety (1964e) “Moanings of Those in Pain: ‘Showcase May reach Justice Dept.; Theatres Seek Co-op Ad Rate.” 12 February, p. 8. Variety (1964f ) “We Were Comfy Before Distribs Went Showcase, Complain of N.Y. Assn.” ­ ebruary, p. 8. 12 F Variety (1964g) “Columbia Engineers ‘The Victors’ into Sub-Run Showcase Pattern.” 12 February, p. 8. Variety (1964h) “Showcase – One Big Community.” 19 February, p. 17. Variety (1964j) “Allied of Illinois Stones ‘Showcase’: Large Gross Benefits Only Distributors.” 19 February, p. 17. Variety (1964k) “Harry Nepo’s Visit to Justice Dept. in Beef against Chicago ‘Showcase.’” 26 February, p. 32. Variety (1964m) “Showcase: New Word Game; First & Second N.Y. First Run.” 15 April, p. 13. Variety (1964n) “Those Who Await ‘Showcase’ in Chicago May Have to Query Uncle Sam to ­A lleviate Stress.” 15 April, p. 13. Variety (1964p) “‘Showcase’ Misapplied at RKO 86th.” 22 April, p. 7. Variety (1964q) “Harry Brandt Hostility to ‘Showcase’ Continues; Will Justice Dept. Act?”, Variety, 6 May, p. 21. Variety (1964r) “On Behalf of His Beacon Theatre Harry Brandt Sues Four Distribs and Chains in Re ‘Showcase.’” 20 May, p. 7. Variety (1964s) “Amsterdam, on N.Y.’s Grind Row, Latest Litigating versus ‘Showcase.’” 3 June, p. 17. Variety (1964t) “Skouras Chain Reply to Brandt’s Beacon Respecting ‘Showcase.’” 11 November, p. 23. Variety (1966) “‘Showcase’ System Cast as Heavy in Latest Brooklyn Antitruster.” 30 March, p. 11. Variety (1969) “Five N.Y. Showcase Tracks; Also Two More for Art Films.” 30 April, pp. 7, 24. Variety (1972a) “Showcase, Credited To UA, Spreading: Some Call It ‘Too Much Good Thing.’” 9 February, p. 23. Variety (1972b) “Fan Sees ‘Showcase’ as Excuse for Hike; More N.Y. Situations ‘Shortaged’ onto Fancy Tracks.” 29 March, pp. 5, 38. Variety (1973a) “East Rockaway Sues Re ‘Showcase’; Claims System Rife with ‘Pressures.’” 10 January, p. 5. Variety (1973b) “Oddities of Showcase Approach; Lost Films’ N.Y. Never Sees.” 17 October, p. 7. Variety (1976) “Saturation Showcase Equals N.Y.” 14 July, pp. 8, 17. Waterman, D. (2009) Hollywood’s Road to Riches. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

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15 When distributors’ trash becomes exhibitors’ treasure Rethinking film success and failure Dean Brandum, Bronwyn Coate, and Deb Verhoeven Of the three arms of the film industry – production, distribution, and exhibition – economic histories have tended to focus on production and distribution companies and their ability to recoup their investments through box office revenue. In their discussion of the film industry, for instance, Jehoshua Eliashberg, Anita Elberse, and Mark Leenders (2006) focus on each of the three key stages in a film’s production chain but view these only in terms of how they lead to audience consumption, which is measured by the film’s aggregated box office take. This view is also the focus in Barry Litman’s seminal industry research (1983, 1989), which has been a catalyst for numerous empirical studies into film success conducted along similar lines (Sochay, 1994; Duan, Gu, and Whinston, 2008). Within these analyses, the exhibition arm is typically characterized as a homogenous entity: a point of revenue collection on which the success or failure of the film title is predicated. This chapter uses a microeconomic approach to reveal how levels of commercial success experienced by particular films at individual venues often differed from the aggregate results recorded by the films’ producers and distributors. Films otherwise regarded as failures often enjoyed successful engagements in some theaters, while perceived hits had disappointing runs in certain venues. We explore the variable definitions of “success” by examining the fortunes of British films released in Chicago’s downtown Loop District and Near North Side theaters during the 1960s. ­ ritish It is generally accepted that after becoming increasingly popular during the 1960s, B films lost favor in the American market, leading to a series of box office failures which culminated in 1968 when the British film production industry fell into a near-terminal decline as Hollywood financiers withdrew their support. Viewed from the alternative perspective of the exhibitor, we argue that releasing strategies shifted British films into venues for which they were ill suited and that this contributed to their declining returns to distributors. Furthermore, we identify distinct microhistories of films at particular venues that run counter to general perceptions of the overall performance of individual films. For example, although Oliver! (Romulus/Columbia, 1968) generated high aggregate box office returns as well as being critically acclaimed and achieving Oscar success, it performed poorly at some ­venues including Chicago’s Bismarck Theatre, where its average weekly takings were 20 percent below the venue’s median takings in 1969.1 Despite generating a low total gross for its 187

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distributor, The L-Shaped Room (British Lion/Columbia, 1963) proved to be a most successful engagement for its major exhibitor in Chicago, the Town, where it generated weekly gross well in excess of the venue’s median weekly takings. The L-Shaped Room demonstrated that a film could draw an appreciative audience at a suitably sized venue without gaining a large overall attendance or a wide release to bolster its gross. These examples alert us to the tendency within film economic histories to describe success or failure predominately by aggregating box office receipts across release territories or jurisdictions. There are, however, many ways of approaching and measuring achievement in the film industry, including consideration of a film’s critical and aesthetic qualities (­Verhoeven, Davidson, and Coate, 2015). The potential of a film to generate box office depends on a multiplicity of factors associated with the characteristics of the film itself, its distribution pattern, and the length of its engagement in cinemas. For the purposes of this chapter, we are specifically interested in testing the measures by which commercial success is understood. We consider a film’s commercial performance at the most granular level – within individual venues – in order to provide an alternative, theatrically centered perspective on success. We benchmark a film’s weekly gross against other films shown in the same venue to provide a complementary evidence base of the success or failure of film titles. This approach enables us not only to emphasize the role of the exhibitor but also to explore how distributor–exhibitor decisions on where to place films influenced their fortunes. Film histories are shaped by normative perceptions. The commercial performance of a film is often taken as evidence of its worth, and in trade advertising, distributors commonly use high early box office revenue as evidence of a film’s intrinsic appeal. The value ascribed to high grossing films is elevated further by such promotional efforts to persuade exhibitors to extend their engagements of popular films, encouraging success to breed further success in what is often a self-fulfilling pattern.

Measuring film success and failure relatively In order to explore the performance of specific film titles at a venue level, we use the metric “difference from weekly average” (DWA), which evaluates the relative commercial performance or “viability” of an individual film in a venue against other films that played in the same venue in the same calendar year in order to determine its comparative financial “success.” DWA results can then be compared across engagements within a venue and ranked in order to gauge the relative performance of different titles, including the extent to which this performance changed over the duration of the engagement. Benchmarking a film’s performance at a particular venue offers an exhibitor-oriented approach to considering film performance, since it provides information about what types of films best draw an audience to a particular venue. This approach enables film success and failure to be contextualized in order to account for the diversity of cinema venues catering for different audiences. A key influence for the development of the DWA methodology has been the work of John Sedgwick (2000), particularly his creation of the POPSTAT index of film popularity. In the absence of reliable box office revenue figures, POPSTAT is a useful measure to gauge film popularity or success on the basis of the venues where films played. However, POPSTAT’s focus on theater capacity means that it is less reliable as an analytic tool for understanding cinema from the late 1960s when audiences’ preferences changed to favor smaller scale cinema venues over aging picture palaces. The source data we have used are drawn from the “Picture Grosses” section that Variety published from 1922 until 1989. Running over several pages, it provided detailed 188

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information on the weekly grosses from the first-run and exclusive theaters in a number of North American cities including Chicago. Initially, only the weekly grosses of a select number of first-run film releases in ten key markets were reported. On its first publication of this information, the paper commented, Variety will endeavour to place before the exhibitor about the country, a fairly accurate estimate from week to week as to the business attracted to the box offices of the regular picture houses of Broadway where the majority of features have their first run showings in New York ... [These data] should serve as a guide to the exhibitor as to what certain features drew to the box office under certain opposition … the figures will also serve as a guide to the independent producer who has something that a Broadway house wants and he will be in a position to combat the “poor business” argument handed him. (Variety 1922, Picture Grosses 47) By the early 1960s, the “Picture Grosses” section had expanded to form an ongoing series of snapshots of individual weeks (or fortnights, considering each week recorded the actual gross of the previous week) across first-run theaters spread across the United States. It is important to note that these data reflect moments in time, and with no accruals of gross recorded for held-over titles, they are of limited value for those interested in the overall performances of particular films. However, for our purposes, these data are ideally suited to measuring film success at the venue level. The “Picture Grosses” data source from Variety has also been converted into real US dollar price equivalents to correct for the effects of ticket price rises due to general inflation over time that would otherwise make across time comparisons less reliable. Price index data were sourced from the Federal Reserve Bank (2016). The formula used to convert current prices to real prices takes the form:  Price Index Yr  N  Real Price Equivalent Value = Value in Yr  N   ×     Price Index  2016  where value and price index in year N is equal to the current price from the period and the respective price index at that time. When analyzing the “Picture Grosses” data, it became apparent that conventional methods of evaluation in terms of Gross Box Office and Gross Per Seat were not ideally suited to assess the relationship between films, or types of films, and the venues that exhibited them. For instance, venues of disparate seating capacities and pricing policies could not be equally compared, while comparisons between venues of similar size and pricing ignore theaters’ unique location, programming strategies, and running costs. In seeking to understand film performance at a venue level, DWA allows us to shift from a conventional “vertical” evaluation in which film grosses over a specified time period are ranked in a dataset of theaters from highest to lowest and instead adopt a “horizontal” evaluation of a film’s performance at a specific venue relative to the venue’s other engagements. It should be highlighted at this point that although DWA provides an assessment of a film’s viability in a particular venue, it does not report on a theater’s overall viability, which is dependent on the balance of running costs and overheads as well as on the revenues it generates, and is critically affected by the contractual terms under which each film is hired. The concept of a film’s viability in a particular theater also allows us to incorporate the temporality of film exhibition in our evaluation of film performance. A calendar year has been chosen as an evaluation period. A venue’s fortunes and circumstances typically change 189

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over time, and programming policies may also alter, making comparisons over longer periods more problematic. Although seasonal factors had an effect on a film’s performance, restricting the focus to a twelve-month period minimizes the likelihood of making unfair comparisons between films. The Variety data provide creates a series of observations of weekly gross across the different titles screened. For venues operating on a first-run or exclusive basis for the entire year, these fifty-two observations generate a median weekly gross. 2 DWA then calculates a film’s divergence from the median in a calendar year. This practice conforms to other benchmark studies including Arthur De Vany and W. David Walls’ article on uncertainty in the movie industry (1999), in which the median figure is used in order to counter the variance in mean (average) figures associated with the relatively common occurrence of skewed box office gross data. All weeks, and therefore all films, within that calendar year can be compared to the benchmark represented by the median weekly gross, with the difference in the ensuing value expressed as a percentage. Formally stated, the DWA is calculated as follows:  Title’s weekly gross − median weekly gross for venue  DWA =       ×  100 Median weekly gross  For films screening beyond one week, DWA is aggregated over time for each engagement. The aggregated DWA value over a film’s life at a particular venue is formally stated as the sum of weekly DWA values: DWA aggregate = DWA wk.1 +  DWA wk.2 + …. + DWA wk.N where N equals the number of weeks the film screens at a particular venue. The benefit of the aggregated DWA is that it reflects the possible drain that a film that screens for too long has on the average expectations of the theater. As a general rule, engagements tend to enjoy a “positive” DWA in their opening week (that is, higher than the median weekly gross); their weekly gross then falls, and DWA typically becomes negative in their final week. Exhibitors aimed to find the right balance between enough accumulated positive weeks from the early period of an engagement to counterbalance the negative final weeks in order to achieve an overall positive result for a venue. Other studies that have highlighted the importance of the length of film engagements include Jordi McKenzie (2009), who used a survival model to determine that exhibitors prefer longer running engagements to those that earn their gross in a shorter time period. He concluded that this was driven by contractual agreements that usually favor an exhibitor if an engagement is screened for a longer period. In their study of multiplex cinemas in central Boston over the period 2000 and 2001, ­Darlene Chisholm and George Norman (2006) found that external forces such as competition from other venues or a film’s star power had little influence on when a theater decided to conclude a film. Instead, they found that the decision was mainly driven by factors internal to the theater, particularly a film’s performance against other films screening in the same venue. This process of decision making about programming confirms the logic of the DWA. For the single-screen venues that are the focus of our analysis, internal decisions would have judged a film’s performance against those of films that had previously screened in the venue, and the data suggest that venue owners were conducting their own version of a DWA analysis as part of their decision making. We do not have access to the contractual details outlining the increasing proportion of box office given to the house over time, which would 190

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be factored into the exhibitor’s decision. It therefore needs to be borne in mind that without this information, DWA emphasizes the diminishing returns of a held-over hit, which may, nevertheless, continue to provide a satisfactory return for the exhibitor.

Analysis and discussion We have collated the box office grosses sourced from Variety for all first-run and exclusive engagements across the city of Chicago for the years 1963–1972, with a focus on venues located in the downtown Loop District as well as the more affluent Near North Side. We use these data to examine the performance of British films at the individual theater level and contrast this to the aggregate fortunes of British film in the United States from this time, as a way of providing new insight into the decline of British films during the late 1960s. Table 15.1 provides a summary description of selected theaters operating in Chicago over the period from 1963 to 1972, including the median weekly box office gross generated by each venue. This figure acts as the benchmark for DWA calculations to consider film performance at each venue. As would be expected, venues with a larger seating capacity typically generated the highest weekly grosses and were most likely to hold over their engagements, which were commonly promoted as blockbuster hits. The table also highlights the turbulence in the exhibition market, as many of the venues closed temporarily to undergo refurbishment during this period. The median weekly box office fluctuated quite markedly across the years, in many cases falling as competition intensified, with suburban cinema complexes opening outside the traditional downtown entertainment precinct by the late 1960s. Considering such performance metrics as the number of engagements and holdovers at the level of the venue, a richer insight into the drivers of film success and failure becomes apparent. A venue’s seating capacity, which has not typically been considered in discussions of the collapse of British films’ popularity in the United States from the late 1960s, was a significant contributing factor to the successes and failures of British films. Table 15.2 provides a summary of the sample venues included in Table 15.1, arranged in tiers by seating capacity. This provides insight into the changing venues in which British films typically played. Considering the period 1967–1968 as a watershed in which, coincident with the rise of New Hollywood, the fortunes of British films in the United States reversed, we contrast the situation of British films across two periods, from 1963 to 1967 and from 1968 to 1972. This examination reveals that the performance of British films varied according to the attributes – particularly the size – of the venues they played in. In the earlier period, British films proved themselves worthy inclusions in the programming across all venue tiers. This is reflected in the positive DWA values associated with British engagements, which performed best in large-sized venues. For the 108 total weeks that British films played in large venues between 1963 and 1967, they generated an average weekly gross that was 43 percent ahead of the large venues’ median over the five-year period. Considering that these venues screened some of Hollywood’s most popular blockbusters, this was an extraordinary figure. These strong results were in part driven by the success of the early James Bond features. British films also proved themselves to be viable engagements for medium-sized venues including the Esquire, which cultivated art house audiences drawn to British cinema and quality programming from the affluent Near North Side area of Chicago. In smaller venues, British engagements proved to be more volatile, with only 42 percent of British engagements ending with a positive DWA in the period 1963–1967. 191

Table 15.1  Descriptive summary of selected theaters in the Loop District and Near North Side of Chicago from 1 January 1963 to 31 December 1972, including median weekly box office grosses reported in real 2016 US$ price equivalents Theater

Carnegie Chicago Cinema Cinestage Esquire Loop McVickers Monroe Oriental Roosevelt State Lake Surf/Play Todd Woods World United Artists

Seats

495 3,900 500 1,038 1,350 606 1,100 1,000 3,400 1,400 2,400 684 1,089 1,200 608 1,700

Total Percentage engagements of films held-over 1963

1964

95 108 117 64 97 93 71 450 141 134 109 102 45 116 167 92

$30,147 $51,368 $51,730 $154,600 $167,420 $199,530 $27,828 $24,352 $29,560 $108,220 $98,930 $110,850 $63,386 $60,880 $73,900 $61,840 $76,100 $79,443 $146,870 $108,443 $110,850 $38,650 $39,572 $36,950 $131,410 $144,590 $184,750 $115,950 $136,980 $140,410 $146,870 $167,420 $145,953 $23,190 $40,333 $39,167 $115,950 $224,495 $192,140 $139,140 $136,980 $155,190 $38,650 $51,368 $48,035 $135,275 $152,200 $162,580

76 100 57 84 92 84 77 4 96 96 99 84 80 97 68 95

$36,456 $176,400 $43,120 $133,280 $62,720 $59,976 $196,000 $39,200 $129,360 $111,720 $190,120 $37,632 $99,568 $121,520 $39,200 $150,920

Median weekly box office in 2016 USD price equivalents

Source: Variety, Picture Grosses from 1963 to 1972 inclusive.

1965

1966

1967

1968

$53,925 $215,700 $68,305 $143,800 $125,106 $93,470

$103,500 $55,590 $61,800 $269,100 $196,200 $173,040 $34,500 $55,590 $61,800 $151,800 $93,195 $72,615 $110,400 $130,800 $74,160 $141,450 $130,800 $105,060 $103,500 $130,800 $148,320 $41,400 $35,970 $37,080 $203,550 $176,580 $173,040 $182,850 $176,580 $185,400 $208,725 $176,580 $182,310 $48,300 $65,400 $54,075 $106,950 $117,720 $105,060 $182,850 $163,500 $191,580 $46,575 $49,050 $52,530 $186,300 $156,960 $173,040

$39,545 $190,535 $174,358 $179,750 $57,520 $125,825 $197,725 $59,318 $147,395

1969

1970

1971

1972

$47,440 $195,690 $42,993 $88,950 $56,335 $118,600 $85,985 $35,580 $157,145 $177,900 $145,285 $42,400 $100,810 $192,725 $29,650 $154,180

$44,485 $246,820 $40,180 $87,535 $50,225 $132,020 $79,361 $31,570 $191,552 $157,850 $143,500 $45,920 $90,405 $200,900 $23,821 $117,670

Table 15.2  Selected descriptive statistics concerning the performance of British films in Chicago by venue tier size, 1963–1967 and 1968–1972 Tier

Aggregate British Percentage of engagements British engagements by tier

Total weeks featuring British engagements

Real gross for British engagements

Average DWA for British engagements (%)

39.6 49.8 10.6

305 433 108

$15,203,462 $55,687,261 $26,995,293

7.7 19.0 43.0

29.0 58.1 12.9

179 360 74

$10,453,472 $47,943,190 $13,049,827

0.0 11.4 −11.6

Percentage of viable British engagements

Percentage of positive weeks generated by British engagements

42 61 61

55.4 61.2 59.3

42.2

44.1

53.3 30.0

56.9 40.5

1963–1967 Small (2,000 seats) 23 1968–1972 Small (2,000 seats)

45 90 20

Dean Brandum et al.

Despite their solid performance in the early to mid-1960s, by 1968, the favor that British films had once found in securing good distribution arrangements had changed. British films had earlier proved themselves as good performers when marketed as quality product and distributed to reach discerning audiences. With the increased competition between different venue types that arose with the advent of the suburban cinema, the landscape for exhibition in the United States shifted. At the same time, the emergence of New Hollywood cinema offered audiences a different type of American film experience, more likely to appeal to those previously drawn to British film. With offerings such as The Graduate (Turman/­Embassy, 1967), Midnight Cowboy (United Artists, 1969), and The Godfather (Paramount, 1972) securing favorable release into the new suburban cinema spaces, British titles were pushed onto screens in venues to which they were not well suited. As audiences were increasingly drawn to the new twin and multiplex venues that were being built in the burgeoning suburbs, large venues lost the prestige they had once enjoyed. While once families would travel into the Loop District to catch the first-run engagement of the latest Hollywood blockbuster, by the early 1970s, few such films were to be found in the area. Theaters such as the Roosevelt, the Oriental, and the Loop, which had once offered a variety of entertainments catering to the broadest possible audience, were now increasingly screening blaxploitation, sex, violence, and horror movies. Like many major American cities, Chicago felt the effects of “white flight” as many ­m iddle-class white Americans moved from the inner city to the suburbs. In Chicago, the demographic shift to the expanding northern districts left many downtown areas abandoned, with empty houses matched by shuttered storefronts. Repopulation occurred swiftly, as the African-American occupants of Chicago’s swelling South Side, a district with a distinctly lower socioeconomic profile, moved into the inner city. As Table 15.2 reveals, the fortunes of British films turned between 1968 and 1972, when they only performed at better than their venues’ median weekly gross in just over 5 percent of the time they spent on screen. Of the 153 individual completed engagements featuring British content, less than half finished with an aggregate DWA higher overall than their venues’ medians. In particular, British films were failing in the large picture palaces in which they had performed so well in the past, and this was exacerbated by the fact that more British films were being booked into these venues, despite their now being ill suited to attract an audience for these films. A different perspective on the fate of particular British film titles in Chicago can be seen beneath the aggregate level. Table 15.3 presents a summary of the top ten and bottom ten performing British titles across the venues included in our sample over the ten-year period. The films’ performance is ranked by aggregate DWA generated. For comparative purposes, the films’ total gross and the rank position of total gross generated across the film set is also provided. From this, we see evidence of the films for which DWA rank and total gross rank deviate, indicating that a delay in moving the film on earlier was detrimental to the films’ overall performance at the venue, particularly for films with overly long engagements. Many films regarded as successes had, in fact, become liabilities in many venues by the time they had run their course. Table 15.3 includes some titles that rank highly in terms of their total box office gross but poorly in relative terms to the cinema. Oliver! is an exemplar case: over the twenty weeks that it played at the Bismarck, it managed to be the top overall grossing British film for the period, but by the end of its run, its dwindling box office had resulted in it performing well below par and generating a negative aggregate DWA around four times below the theater’s average weekly takings. Other major British films, such as Goodbye Mr. Chips (MGM, 1968), Lord Jim 194

Table 15.3  T  op ten and bottom ten ranked British films released in Chicago between 1963 and 1972 by aggregate DWA Top ten

Bottom ten

Year

Title

Venue

Weeks

Total gross

Aggregate DWA (%)

Year

Title

Venue

Weeks

Total gross

Aggregate DWA (%)

1965 1964

Thunderball Goldfinger

Oriental Roosevelt

20 11

$7,349,100 $3,626,955

2,149 1,619

1969 1963

Bismarck Cinema

20 4

$1,788,690 $95,648

−414 −224

1965

Cinestage

25

$3,877,295

1,419

1968

Playboy

10

$487,560

−217

1967 1972

Those Magnificent Men in their Flying Machines You Only Live Twice A Clockwork Orange

Oliver! Rebel with a Cause The Fixer

Chicago Todd

10 18

$5,101,305 $2,634,660

1,365 1,114

1965 1969

Cinestage Carnegie

13 7

$1,094,318 $285,144

−194 −187

1963 1963 1968

Tom Jones The L-Shaped Room The Lion in Winter

Todd Town Esquire

17 14 33

$2,989,570 $623,280 $5,042,653

898 871 814

1967 1963 1967

Playboy State Lake Chicago

4 5 4

$128,701 $621,712 $564,415

−176 −173 −138

1967

A Man for All Seasons

Esquire

28

$4,510,287

805

1968

Esquire

3

$186,300

−131

1967

Taming of the Shrew

Loop

23

$2,791,877

687

1967

Lord Jim Oh What a Lovely War! Privilege Dr. No Funeral in Berlin Mulberry Bush The Bobo

Esquire

3

$212,105

−130

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(Columbia, 1965), The Fixer (MGM, 1968), Half a Sixpence (Paramount, 1967), and Far from the Madding Crowd (MGM, 1967), also feature at the bottom of the list. At the other end of the spectrum are those low grossers with high aggregate DWA. Along with The L-Shaped Room, other examples include The Girl With Green Eyes (Woodfall/Lopert, 1964), Nothing But The Best (Domino/ABC, 1964), Rotten To The Core (Tudor/Cinema V, 1965), The Leather Boys (Stross/Allied Artists, 1964), and Masquerade (Relph/United Artists, 1965).

Conclusion This chapter challenges the reasons typically provided to explain the waning fortunes of British cinema in the post-1968 period. It is generally accepted that a series of US box office failures culminating in 1968 resulted in Hollywood financiers withdrawing their support for the British film production industry. Viewed from the perspective of the exhibitor, we suggest that another explanation lies in the releasing strategies employed by distributors, which shifted British films into cinema venues they were ill suited to and which, therefore, contributed to their lower revenues. We argue that this was at least in part due to changes in the US exhibition and production industries, specifically the emergence of the New Hollywood, rather than the result of any change in the quality or market appeal of British productions themselves. Our argument, therefore, sits outside the typical nationalist analysis that typifies writing on British cinema of this period. Instead, it connects the particularity of local film scenes to the overall viability of British cinema in the 1960s. Focusing on the viability of British films (which are implicitly coded for whiteness and artistic or upper-class distinction) also exposes the important effects of class-based and racialized location in the American downtown in this period. The DWA is a tool designed to understand cinema information at the local and theater levels. As these contexts change to accommodate new social and industry formations, the DWA will also need to develop. We anticipate and welcome further refinement of the tool, for example, in calculating the complexities of dynamic programming in multiplex theaters. At the broadest level, this tool reveals how distinct microhistories of film at particular venues can run counter to general perceptions of film hits and misses. This draws attention to the within film economic histories that describe success or failure based on aggregated box office receipts. Examining aggregate figures (at the continental or global scale) defines movies as an economic and not a social object. Our concern has been to shift discussion of the value of cinema to consider the details of programming as a significant element in the practices of moviegoing, as well as the social context of class and race in the locations of cinemas themselves.

Notes 1 The Bismarck is now operated by Broadway in Chicago under the name Cadillac Palace Theatre. 2 Due to the vagaries in Variety’s publication dates, possibly as a result of leap years, the years of 1964 and 1969 within the datasets had a range of fifty-three weeks.

References Chisholm, D.C. and Norman, G. (2006) “When to exit a product: Evidence from the US m ­ otion-picture market.” American Economic Review, Papers and Proceedings 96(2): 57–61. De Vany, A. and Walls, W.D. (1999) “Uncertainty in the movie industry: Does star power reduce the terror of the box office?” Journal of Cultural Economics 23(4): 285–318.

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Rethinking film success and failure Duan, W., Gu, B. and Whinston, A.B. (2008) “The dynamics of on-line word-of-mouth and product sales – An empirical investigation of the movie industry.” Journal of Retailing 84(2): 233–242. Eliashberg, J., Elberse, A. and Leenders, M. (2006) “The motion picture industry: Critical issues in practice, current research and new research directions.” Marketing Science 25(6): 638–661. Litman, B.R. (1983) “Predicting success of theatrical movies: An empirical study.” Journal of Popular Culture 16: 159–175. Litman, B.R. and Kohl, A. (1989) “Predicting financial success of motion pictures: The 80’s experience.” The Journal of Media Economics 2: 35–50. McKenzie, J. (2009) “Revealed word-of-mouth and adaptive supply: Survival of motion pictures at the Australian box office.” Journal of Cultural Economics 33(4): 279–299. Sedgwick, J. (2000) Popular Film-going in 1930s Britain. Exeter: University of Exeter Press. Sochay, S. (1994) “Predicting the performance of motion pictures.” Journal of Media Economics 7(4): 1–20. Verhoeven, D., Davidson, A. and Coate, B. (2015) “Australian films at large: Expanding the evidence about Australian cinema performance.” Studies in Australasian Cinema 9(1): 7–20.

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Part IV

Exhibition, space, and place Introduction

Investigating the history of cinema necessarily involves attention to the places of exhibition and the spaces in which the films were shown to and watched by audiences. The buildings’ architectural features and decoration, the neighborhood in which they were located, and the modes of transport that people used to travel to them all played a role in the construction of the image of the cinema as a place. New cinema history researchers explore a wide diversity of cinema types, from austere community halls in rural towns and villages or fleapits in depressed urban neighborhoods to the lavish picture palaces in metropolitan centers. This interest in the place of exhibition has in part arisen from “the spatial turn” in media studies, which has had a strong impact on the way we investigate cinema culture. Fruitful conversations with cultural geography have opened cinema historiography up to the study of spatial practices. Besides the conceptual cross-fertilization this has encouraged, digital methods, particularly geographical information systems (GIS), have enabled the enriched mapping of cinema sites, in which the location of venues, patterns, networks, and changes over time can now be visualized in great detail. The chapters in this part demonstrate why it is impossible to study cinema as an ­isolated historical phenomenon. Cultural, linguistic, economic, political, and geographical c­ ontexts are intertwined with the places and spaces of cinema. Beyond the architecture of the buildings themselves, the construction of exhibition history requires a knowledge of urban planning, transportation infrastructures, and even electricity networks. These chapters also demonstrate the extent to which new cinema history is no longer confined to the well-­t rodden landscape of Anglo-European cities, covering Indonesia and Turkey as well as less commonly studied parts of the USA. The chapters share an interest in how local microhistories of individual cinemas or companies connect with larger histories of cinema circuits, systems of exhibition, and regional or national commercial practices. These concerns are also closely related to the work on distribution in Part III and on audiences in Part VI. In his opening chapter, Jeffrey Klenotic considers the position of female film exhibitors within a “people’s history of cinema.” He explores the histories of more than twenty women who owned or managed movie shows in New Hampshire (USA) during the 1910s and 1920s, and examines the tactical maneuvering of female professionals in the face of hostile strategies launched by a consolidating industry. While first-run urban exhibition was normalized as national, professional, and masculine, subsequent-run small town exhibition was

Exhibition, space, and place

marginalized as local, nonprofessional, and frequently feminine. Retrospectively resisting this marginalization of the local, Klenotic uses newspapers and other local resources to create a GIS that maps the development of film exhibition in the state. Writing the female exhibitor back into cinema history, the chapter hints at a latent system of decentralized film exhibition that has been occluded by conventional cinema history. Klenotic shows that giving local female professionals their deserved space leads to new insights into local or community history, going against the grain of existing film historical paradigms on professional identity. Mike Walsh, Richard Maltby, and Dylan Walker study three moments of cinema exhibition in Adelaide, South Australia: 1948, 1965, and 2014. Their chapter examines the similarities of exhibition across seven decades, when considered through patterns of urban geography and the effects of transport systems and cinema clustering. The study makes ­extensive use of mapping tools, augmented by box office analysis and customer survey data. Their classification of exhibition in 1948 provides a baseline account of a mature run/ zone/clearance system of metropolitan first-release and suburban subsequent runs. By 1965, ­d rive-ins had become an established part of the exhibition landscape, resulting in three ­d ifferent clearance systems operating at the same time. In 2014, cinemas were still clustered in retail and entertainment precincts accessible by the dominant forms of transport, although that clustering now occurred within a single multiplex rather than at a range of competing cinemas. As well as arguing that the relationship between distributors and exhibitors is much more diverse than is usually represented, the chapter makes the case that histories of cinema exhibition need to acknowledge the extent to which cinema attendance is closely related to transport practices. In her chapter on early film exhibition in colonial Indonesia, Dafna Ruppin focuses on the infrastructure built by the Dutch authorities to benefit their empire. Colonial Indonesia was at the forefront of modern modes of transportation in Southeast Asia, and operational electricity networks were available in some of the major cities. Exploring the intricate role that transport networks and electricity grids had in introducing and popularizing cinema, Ruppin’s study reveals that new projection technologies and the latest films on offer arrived in remote locations in the “Netherlands Indies” much earlier than assumed in previous research. Drawing on a variety of primary sources in the Netherlands and Indonesia, Ruppin shows how cinema can be recognized as a social institution in which technology, race and colonialism converged. Exploring the hierarchy of access that resulted from the uneven diffusion of technology between the main island of Java and Sumatra, as well as between cities and towns on Java itself, she examines how the infrastructure both facilitated and constrained the work of itinerant exhibitors during the first decade of moving picture shows. In her chapter, Dilek Kaya studies the vivid cinemagoing culture in the city of Smyrna, now Izmir, from 1908 to 1922, when the Great Fire and the end of Greek occupation marked a rupture in the city’s history and memory. Her focus is on one historically, politically, and symbolically significant neighborhood, the Quay (now Kordon), which was often called the “little Paris of the Orient” after its urban design, cosmopolitan population, and liberal social life. Using a range of contemporary non-cinema-related sources, Kaya presents a contextualized map of Smyrna’s early movie theaters. As the city’s major public entertainment venues, Quay cinemas occupied an important place within its cultural atmosphere, and at times became sites of political tensions resulting from clashes between contesting ethnic interests. Kaya brings a new perspective to Turkish cinema historiography, which has been dominated by a nationalist discourse emphasizing the Turkish republican aspects of cinema’s past at the expense of its Ottoman antecedents. Her chapter also calls for a reconsideration of the central position attributed to Istanbul in the histories of early cinema in Turkey. 200

 Exhibition, space, and place

José Carlos Lozano provides a distinctive case study in the history of cinema exhibition in the USA by examining Laredo, Texas, a border town with a predominantly ­Spanish-speaking or bilingual Mexican-American population. Laredo provides evidence of the flexibility and adaptability of cinema exhibition and programming in a cultural, linguistic and geographic context significantly different from the majority of the American market. Using a triangulation of methods involving a cartography of cinemas, an extensive database of films exhibited and oral histories on cinemagoing, Lozano reconstructs the strategies and policies of the Robb & Rowley company, a regional chain that controlled exhibition in the ­Laredo Latino market over a period of more than fifty years. In showing how a large exhibition circuit adapted its programming strategies and “principles of conduct” to a particular local market, Lozano reveals the striking absence of any policy segregating Mexicans or ­Mexican-Americans in the chain’s cinemas, despite this being common practice in many Texan and U.S. cities in the first half of the twentieth century. His chapter illustrates the extent to which the major vertically integrated companies and their affiliates retained control of the business by adapting their distribution and exhibition practices to local circumstance.

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16 Roll the credits Gender, geography, and the people’s history of cinema Jeffrey Klenotic

The presence of women at moving picture shows was key to American cinema’s transformation into a national institution during the 1910s. Richard Abel (2006: 13) highlights the importance of female audiences during this era by opening his account of the shift from variety programs to feature films with a glimpse into the life of an ordinary moviegoer: “Imagine that you are a young woman who has decided to join one of your store clerk or stenographer friends going to the movies after work in downtown Des Moines, Iowa in the spring of 1913.” With earnings and leisure from white-collar jobs, women increasingly chose features over variety and selected from theaters that catered to their tastes for adventure, sensationalism and stars. For exhibitors the value of young female audiences was economic, but as Shelley Stamp (2000: 10) has shown, many venues also tried “to bolster patronage among married, middle-class women who formed a particularly desirable segment of the market because they seemed to embody the respectability keenly sought by an industry long tarnished through its association with tawdry, urban amusements.” She adds that “the cultivation of a female audience for the movies, as well as textual viewing positions open to women, were not incidental to the development of classical cinema in the teens but instrumental to it” (Stamp, 2000: 199). Female audiences exerted significant influence over the developing film industry, but for individual women that influence was abstract. Female moviegoers (like all moviegoers) were part of an anonymous cast playing uncredited roles in an institutional mode of reception. This did not mean local moviegoers were unknown to each other, or that moviegoing was anything less than an active social experience. Rather, from an industry perspective, there was a need to recruit audiences and it did not matter whose names were attached to tickets. Hollywood instead used proxies like “class and mass,” “Broadway and Main Street,” or “sticks, hicks and flaps” to describe audiences (Maltby, 1999: 25). Historical audiences were like the uncredited personnel who populated the other side of the screen in the anonymous mode of film production that had once defined the early industry (Gaines, 2012). Screen credits and other publicity channels developed in the 1910s made the names of writers, players, directors, and production personnel more widely known, but the identities of local audience members remained in the dark. Women’s influence over film exhibition, however, exceeded the audience. There were singers, musicians, and perhaps most importantly many businesswomen who as investors, 202

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proprietors, managers, and booking agents exercised considerable power over local contexts of reception. These women were known by name not only to their audiences and communities but also to other businesswomen (and men), to exhibitor trade papers and associations, and to the network of industry representatives who sold and distributed films. To bring the activities of female film exhibitors into sharper relief, this chapter explores the territory they staked out during the transition to classical cinema. To illustrate, I use research from New Hampshire, where at least 21 women are known to have owned or managed movie shows during the 1910s and 1920s. Like their male counterparts, show-women worked to build successful businesses amid intense competition to secure top-of-the-line feature films and increased pressure to close or sell to theater chains. In New Hampshire, Alfred S. Black, a Maine exhibitor who ran several houses in both states before aggressively acquiring dozens more across New England, primarily applied this pressure. Black sold his chain to Adolph Zukor’s Famous Players-Lasky Corporation (FPL) in 1922, and his dealings with independent exhibitors were a significant component of the Federal Trade ­Commission’s (FTC) investigation of the movie industry for unfair trade practices with hearings ­r unning from 1923 to 1927 (Anderson, 2014). Studying female exhibitors during this era, then, not only recovers their instrumentality in cinema history, it also affords prime opportunity to examine the changing dynamics of gender and geography as evidenced by their tactical maneuvering in the face of hostile strategies launched by a consolidating industry, all in a broader historical context marked by women’s suffrage (Shore, 2014) and concerns over the eclipse of local community (Stein, 1971). Research on women exhibitors adds another layer to the groundbreaking work of ­feminist histories (Abel, 2015; Bean and Negra, 2002; Cooper, 2010; Fuller, 1996; Hallett, 2013; Mahar, 2006; Stamp, 2015) that have mapped the gendered landscape of cinema’s transformation into a national institution. It also contributes to business history and invites comparative research with female managers of the legitimate stage (Chinoy and Jenkins, 2006: 446–460; Davis, 2000: 273–306; Dudden, 1994: 123–148). Finally, the case of women exhibitors allows consideration of larger questions relating to our conventional narrative about the institutionalization of film exhibition, with an eye toward recentering local history in this narrative, asking not just “what caused the local to disappear from cinema history?” but also “what might happen to cinema history if we write the local back into it?”

Hiding in plain sight Women exhibitors have yet to receive comprehensive study. The most extensive work includes Vanessa Toulmin’s (1998) research on female bioscope proprietors in United Kingdom fairgrounds before the First World War; Max Alvarez’s (2008) database compiling information from trade papers on women exhibitors and distributors in the USA between 1901 and 1918; Kathy Fuller-Seeley and Karen Ward Mahar’s (2013) overview essay on women exhibitors during the silent era for the Women Film Pioneers Project; and Cara Caddoo’s (2014a, b) accounts of black women itinerants in the American South and West as part of her study of cinema and early twentieth-century African-American migration. My own contributions stem from discoveries made while using newspapers and other local resources to create a GIS (http://mappingmovies.org) that maps the development of film exhibition in New Hampshire. While much work remains to be done, there is already compelling evidence of a significant number of women who staked claims to the expanding terrain of film exhibition, but not in their expected locations in front of the screen. Instead, these women have 203

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emerged as dynamic entrepreneurs and active producers of space and place who ran theaters and managed the traffic of cinema experiences circulating through them (Klenotic, 2014). Given that research has begun to identify more women exhibitors than conventional film histories would predict, why has it taken so long to discover them? Monica Dall’Asta and Jane Gaines explore a similar question about women in the silent era in general: Between the mid-1970s and through the 1980s the American narrative was “there were no women” in the silent film industry. By the early 1990s, however, the new narrative was: “There were more women working in the first decades of the film industry than at any time since.” … The difference between “no women at all” and “more women than at any other time” is too significant to ignore and deserves more study. But do we explain the difference between these two narratives with a critical theoretical approach or do we address this issue with yet another narration of empirical findings? (2011: 2–3) Elsewhere I have critiqued the limitations of the “discourse of corrective revisionism,” which revises history to correct empirical inaccuracies with the goal of reaching consensus around the “best evidence” (Klenotic, 1994). This approach is founded on the philosophy of scientific realism, which assumes that evidence can be separated from discourse to allow competing interpretations of events to find agreement around common facts. As an alternative, I offered a dialogic model that takes a contingent but empirically grounded approach to history and is underpinned by a materialist conception of rhetoric as the basis for adjudicating truth claims within scientific communities. Here, the discovery of new evidence is not an antidote to “bad history” or a path to consensus. Instead, it creates a rhetorical exigency that invites competing responses in the form of a reflexive conversation about methodological biases and changing conceptions of the past in relation to the present and the future. In the case of film exhibition, emerging evidence of an unexpected number of women exhibitors spurs interrogation of the factors that originally produced the blind spot. On one level, women exhibitors are part of a larger blind spot that shrouds film distribution, what Ivo Blom calls the “missing link” of cinema histories (2003: 25). That link, Maltby argues, was repeatedly forged in countless standard exhibition contracts, but film historiography’s emphasis on the production of texts has thrown a shadow over the relational infrastructure required to circulate these texts, an infrastructure that depended on a legion of small exhibitors whose names were on those contracts. This leaves us with “an unwritten history of the classical Hollywood cinema,” a history that would reveal that “the trade practices that determined who got to see what were intensely local matters” (Maltby, 2013: 140). Film history’s relation to local history, however, has been one-sided and top-down. For example, it seems ineluctable (and not without evidence) to figure the local as a marginal space of parochial experience that was absorbed and standardized so that the corporate and textual structures of Hollywood cinema as a national institution could be established. Yet, as John Durham Peters (2015: 175) reminds us, “experience is what you have when all the content is gone” and it can only be produced locally. But rather than starting from below with the production of local experience and cinema’s stake within it, film history tends to start from above and focus on the production of messages, which despite being “seemingly the most rich and varied material we can find” are also “what disappear the soonest” and are “the most fickle part” of experience (Durham Peters, 2015: 175). While recent scholarship has made major contributions in recapturing the agency of audiences and demonstrating how cinema was used locally in little theaters, non-theatrical venues and neighborhood 204

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houses in ways that far exceeded the entertainment content of films (Acland and Wasson, 2011; Fuller, 2008; Klinger, 2006), this work has arguably not yet displaced a core narrative that defines these forms of cinema culture as specialized or alternative operations (Gomery, 1992). ­Hollywood and its films, rather than diverse varieties of local experience, remain at the center of cinema exhibition history. The roots of this Hollywood-centric narrative, according to Mark Anderson, run to the 1920s when FTC investigations of unfair trade practices against independent exhibitors by Famous Players/Paramount generated self-serving histories of the studio that were inscribed in company records. These records then became privileged sources for histories that “diminished the contested legal, political, and ideological purview of those very records” (2014: 22). Because these records originally “were offered, collected, and preserved in a complicated and contested project to establish the history of a corporation by understanding the development of the studio system itself,” historians “can no longer go into the archive refusing to take sides” (Anderson, 2014: 22–23). Marginalization of the local isn’t only the result of historiographical bias. It is also a function of strategies launched by the industry itself, via actors such as Alfred S. Black in New England and Stephen A. Lynch in the South, as it sought to realign myriad centers of local control over exhibition by relocating them within a centralized system. These strategies had serious implications for women exhibitors because, as Marina Camboni (2004) observes, women’s work in the cultural sphere was networked through local sites devoted to community: “Great numbers of women created culture through their work as community builders, as political organizers, as creators of moments and places of intellectual and artistic exchange, or simply as connectors and supporters” (9). It was in such relationships (formed by women and men both) and sites that gender politics played out. By intervening in these configurations of space and place, the film industry rationalized its distribution model but also intervened in women’s politics during a crucial time of transition from pre-suffrage to post-suffrage America. Rather than being a retrograde outpost on the outskirts of modernization, the local was, as it always is, at the front lines of experience; it was the very stake to be won, less a place to be absorbed than an exchange to be enacted and a palimpsest to be inscribed. The local was highly contested space produced through a complex articulation of networks and sites representing proximate and global actors operating at different scales of social, political, cultural, and economic investment.

Show-women build success The New Hampshire GIS currently covers 85 percent of all towns and cities where movie shows are known to have occurred in the state between 1896 and 1950. Over this period, movies played at 276 venues, of which at least 25 (9 percent) had women proprietors and/or managers for some duration. Two venues had two different women running them, bringing the total number of women exhibitors to 27. Twenty-one of these women ran picture shows or theaters during the 1910s or 1920s. They entered the business from many paths. Some were financiers, some were startups bootstrapped through loans, some were musicians or music teachers, some were apprentices to male showmen in town halls or opera houses, some worked in department stores, some inherited the business from a deceased spouse or relative, some started their own business because a wage-earning spouse had died, and at least one, the most powerful one, was a milliner. The most active years for women entering exhibition were 1912–1913, when seven women joined the field, and 1926–1928, when five women entered (Figure 16.1). 205

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Figure 16.1  New Hampshire’s women exhibitors, 1896–1950

May Burnham Richardson was perhaps the first woman to run movie shows in New Hampshire. She was a suffragist and music teacher who began presenting movies at Eagle Hall in Milford in 1912. Later that year, she converted an old livery stable and blacksmith shop into ­M ilford’s only movie venue, the Star Theatre. Richardson was thrice-married with no children. The first marriage, to a carpenter, left her a widow; the second, to a furniture factory worker, ended in divorce. Her third marriage, at age 58 to a granite stonecutter half her age, lasted until her death seven years later. There is little evidence that May needed help from the town’s bourgeois women to legitimate her theater, though she did occasionally hold 206

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screenings for clubwomen as a non-routine audience. There is also nothing to suggest that May’s work was defined as civic housekeeping. Instead, her business was an act of community sustainability; the Star was helping stave off depopulation by keeping young people from leaving and by attracting visitors to town. May’s legitimacy during the transitional era was secured by her own success, which refuted hegemonic local businessmen who questioned the seriousness of her enterprise, not its morality. When the local newspaper ran a front-page story in 1914 heralding May’s theater, they highlighted her business acumen, noting that she was the only one with the “nerve to take a chance” on movies and the “grit and ability to see it through” (as cited in Klenotic, 2014: 57).

Figure 16.2  Emerging network of women exhibitors, 1917–1920, with gender distribution by county, 1910. Exhibitor trade association meetings in Boston created space for a network of women exhibitors in southeastern New Hampshire, a region where women outnumbered men as a percentage of state population

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In 1913, two more women entered the field, Nellie Dolan in Dover and Lottie M. Pierce in Manchester. Dolan inherited the Lyric Theatre from her deceased husband, to whom she had been married for one year (Moving Picture World). After his death, Nellie stepped in at age 37 and developed the business. One of her first acts was to bring niece Iona May Redden on as an apprentice. Redden may have bartered her labor in exchange for the lodging she and her husband received from Dolan. When Dolan died in 1925, Redden became proprietor, running the theater until 1931. She sold the Lyric to Arthur Pinkham, who managed the Strand Theatre, a Paramount affiliate built in 1919 a few doors down the street. Pinkham promptly closed the Lyric. According to census records, Charlotte (Lottie) Macgibblic was born in Quebec; her parents were born in Scotland. She immigrated to the USA in 1903 and moved to Manchester (New Hampshire’s largest city) with husband Charles Pierce in 1908. Her first job was as a milliner; her husband was a foreman in one of the city’s textile mills. In 1913, she opened the 300-seat Lyric Theatre, which she owned and managed. She was also part owner of the building, which housed downtown businesses such as millinery and beauty shops above the theater. Pierce also acquired a second 300-seat theater, the Queen, in the city’s McGregorville neighborhood. She leased operation of this theater to a male film exhibitor from Maine. By the end of the 1910s, the paths of Richardson, Dolan, Redden, Pierce, and other women exhibitors, such as Cora Reed in Manchester, Minnie Humphrey in Derry, and Mary Bean in Franklin, would become increasingly intertwined through their growing involvement with state, regional, and national exhibitor associations. These organizations brought women into relationship with each other, as well as with male exhibitors. At a November 1917 conference in Boston, for example, the merger of the Motion Picture Theaters Company of New ­England into the Motion Picture Exhibitors League (MPEL) was approved and May B. ­R ichardson and Lottie M. Pierce were attendees (Howe, 1917). Alfred S. Black presented closing remarks, as did Charles H. Bean, who owned the Pastime Theatre in Franklin, NH, which he co-managed with his spouse Mary Bean (Mary took over as sole proprietor in 1923 when Charles became town Postmaster). One year later, Lottie Pierce, Cora Reed, Nellie Dolan, Minnie Humphrey, and Charles Bean attended the July 1918 MPEL convention in Boston, which was again attended by Alfred Black, as well as by Sydney S. Cohen, head of the New York State MPEL (Among Those, 1918; Short Takes, 1918: 28) (Figure 16.2).

The struggle for the local: what if? On 1 May 1919, May Richardson and Lottie Pierce announced a new partnership as c­ o-­owners of Milford’s Star Theatre, formerly owned solely by Richardson (Will Improve, 1919). This “May Day” announcement portended a struggle to reshape business relations in cinema exhibition. At the same time as she partnered with Richardson, Pierce also ended her lease with the Maine operator who had run Manchester’s Queen Theatre on her behalf: “The Queen Theatre was secured by Mrs. Pierce in 1913, and was operated until recently by a Maine theatre concern under lease. Mrs. Pierce took it back several months ago,” eventually renaming it the Rialto (Queen Theatre, 1919: 6). The state’s largest newspaper observed that with these maneuvers Pierce has “proven herself one of the most successful businesswomen in New ­England,” demonstrating a “woman’s keen intuition” by which she “quickly divines what would be pleasing to the public and supplies its needs” (Queen Theatre, 1919: 6). Pierce’s motivation for joining Richardson in Milford and for retaking control of the Queen was “to secure better service from the film producers who rent the pictures” (Will Improve, 1919: 1). The application of her “keen intuition” required access to a sufficient breadth of films: “The fact 208

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that Mrs. Pierce books for three theatres enables her to obtain the finest productions of the motion picture world for all of her places of amusement” (Queen Theatre, 1919: 6) (Figure 16.3). To understand the context in which Pierce decided upon these actions, it is necessary to upscale the analysis to see wider contours of the terrain that she and other exhibitors in New England were contesting locally. In July 1919, Alfred S. Black left the MPEL to become President of the rival Motion Picture Exhibitors of America (MPEA) (Exhibitors United, 1919). Before Black left the League, with its strong ties to New England, he was busy with an aggressive campaign to acquire theaters in the region (More for Black, 1919). Black had calculated that, in 1919, there were 6,500 theaters in towns of less than 5,000 population, and his plan was to bring 4,000 of them under his control. … Black proceeded with the funds at his disposal and was so successful in persuading or frightening exhibitors that he soon had thirty or forty houses in New England. (Hampton, 1931: 253)

Figure 16.3  Lyric Theatre program card. Lottie Pierce built the Lyric into Manchester’s most popular small theater. By 1920, she had trouble obtaining Artcraft films and fires hit her two city theaters. Pierce restored the Lyric and ran it into the 1940s

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Those houses included several in New Hampshire, such as the 800-seat Strand Theatre in Dover that was built in 1919 a few doors down from Nellie Dolan’s Lyric Theatre. It was later revealed that capital for this plan to dominate New England came partly from Zukor’s Famous Players-Lasky, which had quietly purchased a 50 percent stake in Black’s theater chain (Black Denies, 1921). Shortly after Black’s exit, the MPEL was reconfigured within the Motion Picture Theater Owners of America (MPTOA), with Sydney S. Cohen as President. In August 1920, New Hampshire and Vermont exhibitors officially allied with the MPTOA (N.H.-Vermont, 1920). Immediately they began lodging complaints against Black, leading the MPTOA to convene a committee to inquire into alleged coercive methods. These hearings highlighted testimony from Jack Eames, who operated the Park Theatre in Barre, Vermont. Eames testified I had secured an option on a plot in Barre for a larger house and one day told this fact to Sam Merchant, then a salesman for Famous out of Boston. Four days later Alfred S. Black had the option. Then he came to me and told me of the big theater circuit he was organizing … and I figured it wiser to sell and become a part of such a big organization than to attempt to fight. (Welsh, 1920: 2403) The hearings also included testimony from several New England women. One exhibitor from Suncook, NH alleged “it looks to me like Mr. Black attempted to bully women” (Three Organizations, 1920: 42). The most dramatic testimony came from Pauline Dodge, a theater owner in Morrisville, Vermont, who recounted how Mr. Black had extended an offer to her and her husband, Harold, to buy their business and equipment at a fair price, but then went over their heads to obtain an option to buy the building itself from the owners. Black countered that the couple that owned the building, the Emmons, disagreed on whether to sell, with Mrs. Emmons wanting to keep the lease with the Dodges, but her husband wanting to sell (Black Puts, 1920). Mrs. Dodge charged that Black coerced the Emmons to sell by threatening to build a larger theater next door. Black then offered the Dodges a fraction of what he had proposed earlier, with the added caveat that the Dodges’ other small theaters in nearby towns would have to be included in the deal (Welsh, 1920). The offer was refused, but in November 1919 the building’s sale was exercised and the Dodges began paying rent to Mr. Black (Black Puts, 1920). Harold Dodge died in February 1920, and his widow discovered she was now listed as a manager for Black rather than as an independent owner (Welsh, 1920) despite her insistence that she would not accept such a position and was “anxious to continue in business herself ” (Three Organizations, 1920: 40). Minnie Humphrey from Derry, NH, also testified at the hearing, stating that “Black attempted to purchase [her theater] and that the proposition was coupled with the threat, ‘If you don’t sell to us we’ll build an opposition and put you out of business with our big organization and better buying facilities.’” Mrs. Humphrey did not yield and “Black [never] followed up with an attempt to build” (Welsh, 1920: 2409). In 1921, the FTC initiated preliminary investigations and while these were mobilizing, the remaining 50 percent share of Black’s theater chain was sold in July 1922 to Famous Players-Lasky (Alfred S. Black, 1922). When formal FTC hearings began in 1923, Sydney Cohen of the MPTOA testified to strategies Black deployed to coerce independent exhibitors. These included: refusal of service – Black had admitted his chain gave and received preferential treatment regarding coveted Paramount-Artcraft films (Black Denies, 1921); 210

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building or leasing of houses by interests allied with Famous Players-Lasky to compete with exhibitors who refused to pay high film rentals; and rumors of building or leasing of theaters by interests allied with Famous Players-Lasky including circulation of theater blueprints and drawings (Federal Commission, 1923). Cohen submitted 42 complaints from MPTOA exhibitors detailing examples of these strategies. A series of letters from Alfred S. Black to Lottie M. Pierce were among these documents (Federal Commission, 1923; Government Hearing, 1923). The dates and contents of these letters are not yet known, but they likely emanate from the period around May 1919 when Pierce partnered with Richardson and ended her relationship with the “Maine exhibitor” to whom she had leased the Queen Theatre for six years. Manchester, NH, newspapers indicate that 1919 and 1920 were challenging years for Pierce. The Artcraft logo that regularly adorned advertising for her Lyric and Queen theaters disappeared on 24 September 1919, although it remained on two other city theaters. A fire of unknown origin struck the Lyric 28 January 1920 with the theater eventually able to reopen (Fire, Lose All, 1920), and then sometime between April and November 1920 another fire of unknown origin permanently closed the Rialto (Theatres, 1921). Finally, throughout 1920 rumors circulated about an enormous new theater to be designed by architect Thomas Lamb at the bequest of an unnamed “big concern” in the picture industry; the city newspaper ran a contest asking readers to guess the location, but the theater never materialized ($250,000 House, 1920). A notable aspect of the MPTOA and FTC meetings is that testimony given by men reveals a readiness to sell out, partly because they felt they could not compete with the larger interests but also because they saw opportunities for new jobs in these organizations. The women’s testimony, however, shows a willingness to defend livelihoods and communities against hostile takeover by outside interests. Nellie Dolan held on to her theater in Dover, even as Alfred Black’s partner threatened to build, and then built, a larger house on the same street that was undoubtedly designed to put her out of business. She even groomed her successor, Iona Redden, despite the challenges of obtaining quality films. Likewise, May Richardson, Lottie Pierce, and Minnie Humphrey could have sold out but instead chose to cultivate alliances and fight back. Pierce lasted at the Lyric into the 1940s. Even the Emmons in Morrisville, VT, evidenced a split between Mr. Emmons, who wanted to sell, and Mrs. Emmons, who wanted to preserve local arrangements. As builders of community, these women recognized the value of their work on the local level. It is also possible that women fought harder because the jobs offered to men by the larger companies were not offered to them, or if offered, they were not perceived as holding real chance of advancement. As ­Fuller-Seeley and Ward Mahar (2013: 10) have shown, women in the 1920s were squeezed from consideration for top-of-the-line theater management jobs because the corporations that ran the studios “imposed a masculinized model of professionalization” that required managers to attend national training schools and master technical projection skills, even though such skills had ceased to be the responsibility of the house manager. The other half of this equation is that even as first-run, urban exhibition was normalized as national, professional, and masculine, so too was subsequent-run, small town, neighborhood exhibition marginalized as local, nonprofessional, and feminine. This binary was not rooted in essentialist gender differences, but was the product of a strategic articulation of gender and geography (Massey, 1994) timed to the moment of women’s enfranchisement. Consider, for instance, the opening announcement made to the local press by Harvey Wilson, a longtime Manchester theatrical manager who in 1920 was hired by Lottie Pierce and May Richardson to manage their newly co-owned theater in Milford, NH: “It is our endeavor to see that the entertainment will be consistent with the dignity of American manhood, and our playhouse a 211

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fitting place of entertainment for the mothers, daughters, sisters and wives” (Announcement, 1920). Here, the urban male manager inscribes the small town’s local exhibition site with a masculine performance that vows to protect women whose identities are defined by the patriarchal family. The announcement, coming four months after women won the right to vote, inscribes a dualism between male exhibitors and female audiences. In Milford, this discourse had been absent for eight years while suffragist and businesswoman Richardson managed the theater. By the 1920s, professionalization of first-run urban theaters (increasingly defined as big business operations) in tandem with strategies deployed against small exhibitors by a­ ctors like Alfred S. Black created an undertow that pressured small theaters to assert masculine credentials or risk further marginalization. This reinforced self-serving corporate narratives from the FTC hearings in which the “the voice of the male executive” increasingly became “identified with history itself ” (Anderson, 2014: 4). In the global struggle to influence the very process of the formation of the local, power to articulate the coordinates of gender and geography shifted from networks of culture and politics to political economy. Alfred Black, who helped engineer this shift, mapped the new reality as he announced the sale of the remaining one-half interest in his New England theater circuit to Famous Players-Lasky (Figure 16.4): I believe that within a reasonable time not only the Exchange manager but the important heads and managers of the exhibiting end of the business will be placed upon a contingent basis as to profits that will, in turn, bring about closer harmony and interest in local communities. The exhibitor in the small cities and towns need have no further fear of producer competition, provided he is reasonably fair in his own dealings with that branch of the business. … [I]n the future the fear that he has entertained will give place to a keen desire for co-operation with the larger interests, especially in the exhibiting field. (Alfred S. Black, 1922: 509)

Figure 16.4  M PEL convention, 1918. Several women were delegates to the Boston convention of the MPEL (Crawford, 1918). What if studio narratives legitimizing vertical integration had failed to gain traction and exhibition remained decentralized?

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But what if we write the female exhibitor back into this story? By way of counterfactual history, what if Sydney Cohen’s claim that between 1919 and 1922 the small theater was the “most vital force in the industry” (Federal Commission, 1923) won sufficient historiographical integration during the FTC hearings to impose an effective counterweight against any narrative asserting the inevitability of corporate centralization in the film industry? And what if, as a result, the industry never became vertically integrated and this then afforded women sufficient discursive space to leverage their presence in exhibitor trade associations to promote networking and the exchange of ideas, such that the first generation of women exhibitors successfully passed on their accumulated knowledge and connections to the next generation of women? And what if exhibition then became a frontier for women after suffrage, rather than a space of diminishing opportunity? Would these women have expanded not only in small theater ownership but also first-run ownership? Would this then have created more space in theaters for films written and directed by, not just starring, women? And would these then be the women whose footprints were so large and so many as to insure that no historical narrative could imply that women did not have instrumental roles as entrepreneurial producers of the spaces and places that came to define what we now call classical Hollywood cinema? By refracting cinema’s corporate consolidation through the prism of a counterfactual narrative that reveals a latent system of decentralized film exhibition, a new landscape of inquiry emerges that is otherwise occluded by the visible horizon of conventional cinema history. New people, places, and possibilities enter the historical imagination. Rather than focusing on the absorption of local experience by the institutionalization of Hollywood and the strategic ideological work of its moguls and films, this new landscape encourages wide exploration of the tactics of individuals and groups who mediated, resisted, or otherwise made sense of these strategies through the continued production of local experience, thereby restoring their agency as historical actors. Preserving this sense of agency is as important for our understanding of globalization and the production of space and place in the 2010s and 2020s as it is for our understanding of these same processes in the 1910s and 1920s. The outcome, however, is not the recovery of forgotten people and places that can be added to the subaltern geography of cinema history to present a more exhaustive empirical account of that history. Instead, counterfactual thinking about roads not taken reimagines and repositions cinema history itself as part of an expansive and open-ended landscape of people’s history. Hollywood does not occupy the center of this broader landscape, nor is it pushed to the periphery, but is reconstituted as a powerful, dynamic, and widely diverse field of relational networks and cultural exchanges. Such a deterritorialization of Hollywood may be hard to imagine unless we take a different side pertaining to cinema as an object of study, especially in studio archives (Anderson, 2014). Doing so, however, makes it less likely that the historical contributions of those otherwise doomed to remain hiding in plain sight will be missed, which in turn serves as a powerful reminder “of the power of discourses about the past to alter reality and change history for the present and the future” (Klenotic, 1994: 57). This is particularly important if we are to imagine that 100 years from now, more women will be found working in all levels of cinema than is the case today, or was the case 100 years ago.

Conclusion This chapter examined the institutionalization of film exhibition from a grounded perspective that produces knowledge from the bottom up. This approach digs for “small” data to discover individuals marginalized by studio archives and narratives designed to create larger 213

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than life heroes and imagined national communities. Such individuals may be found managing the most proximate of problems – deteriorating relationships, sudden deaths, failing health, family troubles, fires, financial distress, community depopulation, and coercive business dealings to name a few – while also enmeshed with distant figures often heard about if not seen. Ordinary people occupied the territory of cinema exhibition just as corporate executives did; their relations mediated through contracts, distribution exchanges, sales representatives, exhibitor associations, and federal commissions. Who were these people? How might cinema history be transformed if we knew their names and stories? How might the future then change, given that historians and histories are potent actors in the always-unfolding present? Today, for example, efforts like #MeToo and the Time’s Up Legal Defense Fund demand workplace changes in the film industry and beyond based on personal narratives that break a long-silenced history of harassment and threats of retaliation against women workers. The names of proprietors certainly mattered to the trade and local presses, where references abound documenting specific individuals opening, closing, or exchanging businesses in the smallest of venues, in the tiniest of towns, in the remotest of areas. Yet in conventional accounts of cinema history, the people in this multitude of exhibitors often remain opaque or invisible, much like the moviegoers they served. But if we give local actors an identity and a voice not just a role or function, we may gain new insights about cinema’s imbrication in the production and ideological organization of experience by digging more deeply into what Kate Bowles calls the “vernacular mapping” of their historical circumstances. This path, however, departs from the “big picture cinema history” we think has greatest value to our field (Bowles, 2014). It leads to local or community history, and that is not a place many wish to be, partly because it requires e­ xpansive empirical knowledge but also because it goes against the grain of existing paradigms and structures for professional identity and advancement (Allen, 2006; Maltby, Walker, and Walsh, 2014). But where is our field? Where is cinema? The blind spot shrouding the local obscures its centrality to our object of study; similar to what Gaines observed in film histories that focus on credited players rather than the uncredited, though the latter were the rule in early cinema. “If we were to study the rule of anonymity rather than its exceptions,” she writes, “our version of industry growth would look quite different. We would be studying less the evolution of the star system than the expansion of unacknowledged … screen work as the industry grew” (Gaines, 2012: 443–444). Recovering the traces of exhibitors (and audiences) overwritten by industry narratives and historiographical biases invites an account of classical cinema that resists demoting local actors from credited to uncredited roles in the medium’s development. Cinema history converges with people’s history, centering less on the evolution of the studio system than on the activities of myriad producers of space and place whose work building local communities of cinema persists long after vertical integration and into the home viewing era (Forsher, 2003; Herbert, 2014; Klenotic, 2007). This shift presents historians with significant challenges relating to scale, methodology, and narrative, but none more daunting than what exhibitors themselves experienced in their own struggles to produce and inscribe the local in times of transition.

References “$250,000 House for Manchester” (1920) Wid’s Daily 29 January, p. 4. Abel, R. (2006) Americanizing the Movies and “Movie-Mad” Audiences, 1910–1914. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Abel, R. (2015) “‘A Great New Field for Women Folk’: Newspapers and the Movies, 1911–1916.” Screening the Past 40, Web, 15 September www.screeningthepast.com/2015/08/%E2%80%9­Cagreat-new-field-for-women-folk%E2%80%9D-newspapers-and-the-movies-1911-1916/ [Accessed 29 November 2018]

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Roll the credits Acland, C. and Wasson, H. (eds.) (2011) Useful Cinema. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. “Alfred S. Black and Brother Sell Interest in New England Theatres to Famous Players” (1922) Exhibitors Trade Review 15 July, p. 509. Allen, R. C. (2006) “Relocating American Film History: The Problem of the Empirical.” Cultural Studies 20(1): 48–88. Alvarez, M. (2008) “1901–1918 Women Exhibitors and Distributors.” Unpublished database. See “Gender and Film Exhibition.” https://www.mappingmovies.com/posts/mapping-the-genderedlandscape-of-silent-era-film-exhibition/ [Accessed 29 November 2018] “Among Those Present.” (1918) Wid’s Daily July 20, p. 3. Anderson, M. L. (2014) “The Historian is Paramount.” Film History 26(2): 1–30. “Announcement” (1920) The Milford Cabinet and Wilton Journal 30 December, p. 1. Bean J. and Negra, D. (eds.) (2002) A Feminist Reader in Early Cinema. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. “Black Denies He Conspired to Dominate New England” (1921) Exhibitors Herald 22 October, p. 53. “Black Puts in His Defense.” (1920) The Billboard 23 October, p. 1. Blom, I. (2003) Jean Desmet and the Early Dutch Film Trade. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Bowles, K. (2014) “Beyond the Boundary: Vernacular Mapping and the Sharing of Historical Authority.” In J. Hallam and L. Roberts (eds.) Locating the Moving Image: New Approaches to Film and Place. Bloomington: Indiana University Press (pp. 221–244). Caddoo, C. (2014a) “A ‘Picayune Entertainment’: African-American Women and Early American Film Exhibition.” Unpublished paper, American Historical Association Conference. Caddoo, C. (2014b) Envisioning Freedom: Cinema and the Building of Modern Black Life. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Camboni, M. (2004) “Networking Women: A Research Project and a Relational Model of the Cultural Sphere.” In M. Camboni (ed.) Networking Women: Subjects, Places, Links Europe-America. Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura (pp. 1–26). Chinoy, H. K. and Jenkins, L. W. (eds.) (2006) Women in American Theatre. New York, NY: Theatre Communications Group. Cooper, M. G. (2010) Universal Women. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press. Crawford, M. (1918) “Boston Convention Has Whirlwind Finish.” Exhibitors Herald and Motography 3 August, pp. 21–22. Dall’Asta, M. and Gaines, J. (2011) “Constellations: When Past and Present Collide in Feminist Film History.” Unpublished paper, Doing Women’s Film History Conference, http://wf h.wikidot.com/ dwf h-full-programme [Accessed 29 November 2018] Davis, T. C. (2000) The Economics of the British Stage. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Dudden, F. E. (1994) Women in the American Theatre. New Haven, NJ: Yale University Press. “Exhibitors United at St. Louis Meet.” (1919) Exhibitors Herald and Motography 12 July, p. 29. “Federal Commission Ends New York Hearing.” (1923) Exhibitors Trade Review 30 June, p. 201. “Fire, Lose All.” (1920) Manchester Daily Mirror and American 28 January, p. 1, 4. Forsher, J. (2003) The Community of Cinema: How Cinema and Spectacle Transformed the American Downtown. Westport, CT: Praeger Publishers. Fuller, K. H. (1996) At the Picture Show: Small Town Audiences and the Creation of Movie Fan Culture. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press. Fuller, K. H. (ed.) (2008) Hollywood in the Neighborhood. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Fuller-Seeley, K. and Mahar, K. W. (2013) “Exhibiting Women: Gender, Showmanship, and the ­Professionalization of Film Exhibition in the United States, 1900–1930.” In J. Gaines, R. Vatsal, and M. Dall’Asta (eds.) Women Film Pioneers Project, Center for Digital Research and Scholarship, New York, NY: Columbia University Libraries, Web, https://wfpp.cdrs.columbia.edu/essay/ exhibiting-women-gender-showmanship-and-the-professionalization-of-film-exhibition-in-the-­ united-states-1900-ndash-1930/ [Accessed 29 November 2018] Gaines, J. (2012) “Anonymity. Uncredited and Unknown in Early Cinema.” In A. Gaudreault, N. Dulac and S. Hidalgo (eds.) A Companion to Early Cinema. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell (pp. 443–459). Gomery, D. (1992) Shared Pleasures: A History of Movie Presentation in the United States. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press. “Government Hearing Ends in Boston.” (1923) Motion Picture News 1 September, p. 1025. Hallett, H. (2013) Go West, Young Woman. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

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Jeffrey Klenotic Hampton, B. (1931) History of the American Film Industry from Its Beginnings to 1931. New York, NY: Covici-Friedi Publishers. Herbert, D. (2014) Videoland: Movie Culture at the American Video Store. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Howe, R. D. (1917) “Exhibitors of New England Get Together.” Moving Picture World 10 November, p. 841. Klenotic, J. (1994) “The Place of Rhetoric in ‘New’ Film Historiography: The Discourse of Corrective Revisionism.” Film History 6(1): 45–58. Klenotic, J. (2007) “‘Four Hours of Hootin’ and Hollerin’’: Moviegoing and Everyday Life Outside the Movie Palace.” In R. Maltby, M. Stokes, and R. C. Allen (eds.) Going to the Movies: Hollywood and the Social Experience of Cinema. Exeter: University of Exeter Press (pp. 130–154). Klenotic, J. (2014) “Space, Place and the Female Film Exhibitor: The Transformation of Cinema in Small Town New Hampshire during the 1910s.” In J. Hallam and L. Roberts (eds.) Locating the Moving Image: New Approaches to Film and Place. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press (pp. 44–79). Klinger, B. (2006) Beyond the Multiplex: Cinema, New Technologies, and the Home. Berkeley, CA: ­University of California Press. Mahar, K. W. (2006) Women Filmmakers in Early Hollywood. Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins ­University Press. Maltby, R. (1999) “Sticks, Hicks and Flaps: Classical Hollywood’s Generic Conception of Its ­Audiences.” In M. Stokes and R. Maltby (eds.) Identifying Hollywood’s Audiences: Cultural Identity and the Movies. London: BFI Publishing (pp. 23–41). Maltby, R. (2013) “The Standard Exhibition Contract and the Unwritten History of the Classical Hollywood Cinema.” Film History 25(1–2): 138–153. Maltby. R., Walker, D., and Walsh, M. (2014) “Digital Methods in New Cinema History.” In P. L. Arthur and K. Bode (eds.) Advancing Digital Humanities: Research, Methods, Theories. ­Houndsgrave, ­Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan (pp. 95–112). Massey, D. (1994) Space, Place, and Gender. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. “More for Black.” (1919) The Film Daily 26 September, p. 1. Moving Picture World (1913) 13 December, p. 1295. “N.H.-Vermont Exhibitors Ally with National League” (1920) Exhibitors Herald 14 August, p. 39. Peters, J. D. (2015) The Marvelous Clouds: Toward a Philosophy of Elemental Media. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. “Queen Theatre Renamed and Remodeled.” (1919) Manchester Daily Mirror and American 29 July, p. 6. Shore, A. (2014) Suffrage and the Silver Screen. New York, NY: Peter Lang Publishing. “Short Takes and Long Shots at Boston.” (1918) Exhibitors Herald and Motography 3 August, pp. 25, 28. Stamp, S. (2000) Movie-Struck Girls: Women and Motion Picture Culture after the Nickelodeon. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Stamp, S. (2015) “Feminist Media Historiography and the Work Ahead.” Screening the Past 40, Web, 16 October, 2015. www.screeningthepast.com/2015/08/feminist-media-­h istoriography-and-thework-ahead/ [Accessed 29 November 2018] Stein, M. R. (1971) The Eclipse of Community: An Interpretation of American Studies. Princeton, NJ: ­Princeton University Press. “Theatres & Movies.” (1921) Manchester Daily Mirror and American 8 January, p. 7. “Three Organizations Probe Activity of Alfred S. Black.” (1920) Exhibitors Herald 2 October, pp. 39–42. Toulmin, V. (1998) “Women Bioscope Proprietors – Before the First World War.” In J. Fullerton (ed.) Celebrating 1895: The Centenary of Cinema. Sydney: John Libbey (pp. 55–65). Welsh, R. E. (1920) “Small Theatre Owners Take Stand against Alfred S. Black.” Motion Picture News 25 September, pp. 2403, 2409. “Will Improve Star Theatre.” (1919) Milford Cabinet 1 May, p. 1.

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17 Three moments of cinema exhibition Mike Walsh, Richard Maltby, and Dylan Walker

On the face of things, cinema exhibition seems to be completely transformed in the age of the multiplex. Where first-run exhibition once centered in downtown areas, it has now been evacuated to shopping malls on the urban fringes. Films that once played out over months are now gone in a scant few weeks to be released with greater speed on more lucrative platforms. Recent estimates suggest that cinema box office now makes up less than a quarter of a film’s total revenues (Ulin, 2010: 161). It is easy to see how exhibition has changed. If, however, we ask questions about the ways in which exhibition has remained the same over an extended period, the answers may reveal the explanatory power of those aspects of exhibition practice that have to do with place: patterns of urban geography, the impact of transport systems, and the effects of cinema clustering. In an attempt to identify these factors and trace underlying points of similarity and difference, this study analyses three moments in cinema exhibition in Adelaide, South Australia. The year 1948 provides a base-line model of a mature system of metropolitan first-release and suburban subsequent runs that had endured for two decades. By 1965, drive-ins had become an established part of the exhibition landscape, in response to new patterns of urban land use and the transformation of urban transport wrought by motor cars. Finally, we analyze the present system of multiplex circuits developed during and since the 1990s. These analyses take into account the institutional politics of local exhibition, charting the decline of one set of suburban exhibitors, the Ozone and Clifford chains, and the rise of another, Wallis Cinemas, which transitioned into the multiplex period from its origins in drive-ins. The study will make extensive use of mapping tools developed as part of the Cinema Audiences in Australia Research Project (CAARP) and AusCinemas projects.1 The CAARP database can be used to record the release patterns of films as they move through local venues, while AusCinemas details and maps the changing locations of cinema venues. We will augment this with box office analysis and customer surveying conducted in collaboration with Wallis.

Moment 1: 1948 The latter years of the 1940s are the high water mark for a system of exhibition established in the 1920s, when the number of cinema venues in Adelaide reached its zenith. It is a system that will be recognizable in many other western cities. Generally described as 217

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the run/zone/clearance system, it saw cinemas graded by their place in a staggered release chain. Jeffrey Ulin (2010: 5) has described the enduring features of this system as (a) time, (b) exclusivity, (c) differential pricing, and (d) repeat consumption, “managed by creating exclusive or otherwise distinct periods of viewing.” In its 1920–1940s version, films entered the market at first-run cinemas clustered in the entertainment districts of Central Business Districts (CBDs) in large cities and charging premium prices. Cinemas were ordered by their class of release, or run. This granted them spatial exclusivity by restricting competition within a geographical zone, and temporal exclusivity by creating a window, or gap, between runs. Each run was marked by steadily decreasing price points that encouraged additional and repeat consumption. This generalized description, however, covers a multitude of further distinctions that need to be addressed if we are to grasp the detail of the system in operation. First run could be divided into two types of release: long run, in which the film ran in a cinema until it fell below a set level of sales, or weekly change, in which the program would be changed each week regardless of the film’s performance. Films exhibited in long-run houses were generally more expensive to produce and more attractive to patrons and hence took longer to exhaust their potential audience. Weekly change houses acknowledged the regularity of cinemagoing, with some cinemas offering season tickets with reserved seats on the most popular evenings. If the audience was the same each Saturday night, the films obviously needed to change. This dual system addressed the way that films were both special events and regularized items of consumption. Commercial divisions that grouped cinemas into competing circuits provide another crucial factor. In 1948 Adelaide had eight first-run cinemas. The national Greater Union (GU) circuit operated the Wests (1,448 seats), Civic (1,441), and Mayfair (933) cinemas. Wests was a long-run cinema primarily featuring Paramount films, and also those from Universal and Columbia. The Civic long-ran less prestigious Universal and Columbia releases, but often changed program weekly. The Mayfair was a weekly change house that released primarily Warner Bros. films. GU’s major commercial rival was Hoyts, whose flagship Regent (2,262 seats) was easily Adelaide’s largest first-run cinema. Hoyts was owned by Twentieth Century Fox, and hence the Regent primarily first-ran Fox films. Because of its size the Regent ran on a weekly change policy, constantly renewing the program in an attempt to minimize the number of empty seats. This policy relied on Hoyts’ control of the nearby 1,157-seat Rex. Films that performed well at the Regent were generally moved over to the Rex for a second week. The other first-run house of note was the 1,300 seat Metro, which was a long-run house releasing only MGM films. MGM’s parent company Loew’s Inc. was distinguished by the way that it invested internationally in a chain of Metro cinemas so that it could control the first release of its films in major centers around the world, and it ran at least one cinema in every Australian mainland capital. Figure 17.1 shows the heavily clustered location of these first-run cinemas, largely along a single street, named Rundle Street on its eastern half and Hindley Street on its west. The clustering indicates an entertainment district similar to those in most large western cities of the period. Entertainment districts existed close to the convergence points for the city’s radial public transport systems, which are illustrated in Figure 17.2. These districts were attractive to consumers whose first choice of film was sold out or those who had not necessarily decided on a particular film. They also attracted co-location by ancillary and associated retailers such as confectioners and restaurants. By locating first-run cinemas at retail and commercial hubs, exhibitors could charge a premium and could extend their screening hours 218

Three moments of cinema exhibition

Figure 17.1  M ap of Adelaide first-run cinemas in 1948

as the CBD attracted crowds throughout the day to shop or work, or as a travel interchange point. People travelled to CBD entertainment districts, but suburban cinema was premised on films travelling out to localized audiences. Just as first-run was dominated by c­ ompetition ­between two players, so was suburban exhibition. The Star circuit, established by Dan ­Clifford in 1917 and incorporated into GU in 1947, controlled 21 suburban screens with a combined capacity of over 28,000 seats. The Ozone circuit, founded by the Waterman ­family, in 1911 had eleven screens with a capacity of just under 15,000 seats (Walker, 1996: 79–122). There were, therefore, many more seats in the suburbs than in the CBD: over 52,500 compared to the 13,650 that made up first-run cinema. Figure 17.2 also demonstrates the persistence of clustering among suburban cinemas. There are two types of clustering, both produced by intense competition between circuits. Both Star and Ozone circuits had closely co-located cinemas in the suburbs of Goodwood, Unley, Glenelg, Port Adelaide, and Semaphore as they shadowed each other at key nodes of consumption. On the other hand, the Star circuit maintained two cinemas at Norwood, Parkside and St Peters, where they had opened new cinemas but retained the older hall to deny the Ozone circuit an opportunity to establish itself in competition. While audiences travelled relatively short distances to suburban cinemas, public transport routes were a vital consideration. In 1948, the people of Adelaide averaged 270 trips on public transport a year (South Australian Parliamentary Papers, 1949). Virtually all suburban cinemas were located close to bus, train or tram routes, and their night-time programs were timed to end just prior to the final public transport services. One of the major concerns of the Royal Commission into motion pictures in 1927–1928 had, indeed, been the way that audiences raced from cinemas to catch public transport instead of standing for the national anthem (Walsh, 2015).2 First-run releasing typically involved four sessions per day, six days per week. Suburban exhibition was a less intensive activity with between one and seven screenings per week. Distributors brought a maximum of three prints into the state at any one time and so films took considerably longer to circulate. There were significant differences in the way films 219

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Figure 17.2  Map of suburban cinemas and public transport, 1948

moved through the suburbs, determined by the relations between exhibition and distribution. Case studies of three films that opened in early 1948 demonstrate this. The Paramount romantic comedy Dear Ruth (1947) was released in Adelaide in February 1948. It played 96 times in four weeks at Wests cinema in first release, but it took sixteen weeks to screen a further 103 times throughout the suburbs. Clifford’s Star circuit had been acquired by GU in 1947, but the two chains had long had close connections: the Royal Commission in 1927–1928 heard that Clifford paid 10 percent of its profits to the forerunner of GU (Walsh, 2015). Paramount films were released exclusively through GU and then, accordingly, through Star cinemas. After Dear Ruth’s first run, the print left Adelaide for the thirty-day window that was a requisite part of the standardized exhibition contracts instituted in 1934. It then played exclusively throughout the Star circuit for 77 screenings from mid-April to the first week in June. Only after the film had played at every single Star cinema was it booked to independent cinemas and a handful of Ozone cinemas for 25 more screenings between June and August. 220

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The pathway of a 20th Century Fox film through the city was subtly different. In early March the historical romance The Foxes of Harrow (1947) played one week with 24 ­screenings at Hoyts’ large weekly-change Regent before moving over for a second week at the Rex. Due to the non-exclusivity of Fox’s contracts, it then played at both Star and Ozone s­uburban cinemas simultaneously during April and June. By the end of its suburban run it had been screened 41 times by each circuit, often screening at the rival circuits on the same night. Like Dear Ruth, it never screened at more than three cinemas on any night, suggesting that a small number of prints were being carefully moved around the city.3 Unlike Paramount, Fox clearly had a policy of moving films through first-run more quickly, trusting that the larger Regent would compensate for shorter runs. The trade-off was that they looked to get more suburban bookings by dealing with both Star and Ozone circuits equally. It is difficult to overemphasize the contrast in distribution strategies employed by MGM, particularly in comparison to Fox. Song of the Thin Man (1947), the last of MGM’s comedy detective series, opened on 12 March at the Metro and ran for 48 screenings over two weeks. It did not then reappear in Adelaide for a staggering fourteen weeks after this initial release, and then only for a total of thirteen screenings in two independent theaters and two Ozones. This enormous window, quite typical for MGM, is explained by the company’s ownership of its own first-run cinema. The vertically integrated MGM had an interest in keeping its films in its own theaters for as long as possible, taking profits at both exhibition and distribution phases by accustoming the audience to see the film in first release rather than endure a long wait.

Moment 2: 1965 The 1950s and 1960s are often regarded as a period of decline for cinema exhibition – even as they entail an expansion of the film industry through the addition of a lucrative new release platform in television. The comparison with 1948 should allow us to understand better the changes wrought in this period. Six years after the start of television in Adelaide in 1959, film exhibition was struggling to establish a new point of equilibrium that was both different from, and an extension of, what we saw in 1948. Television’s effects were not felt equally across the exhibition sector. The year 1965 saw eight first-run cinemas still clustered in Rundle and Hindley Street. There had been no reduction in numbers and seven of the cinemas were the same buildings although total seating capacity had shrunk by 30 percent. With size now a threat rather than an advantage, the major circuits had reduced the size of auditoria rather than closing them. GU reduced Wests from 1,448 seats to 690, while Hoyts’ 1,157 seat Rex had been closed and replaced by the 584 seat Plaza. The other notable change in first-run releasing was the death of the weekly change. This revealed the true impact of television, which had taken the place not of cinema tout court, but of those aspects of it dominated by highly regularized consumption. With fewer but larger-scale films in distribution pipelines, every first-run cinema was potentially a long-run proposition, led by “hard-ticket productions” – what we would now call tentpole films – such as Lawrence of Arabia (Horizon/Columbia, 1962), which ran for 32 weeks at Wests, and Tom Jones (Woodfall/United Artists, 1963), which ran for 31 weeks at the Plaza (Film Weekly, 1964–65: 8). The Fall of the Roman Empire (Bronston/Paramount, 1964) (twenty weeks at Wests), The Carpetbaggers (Embassy/Paramount, 1964) (seventeen weeks at the Majestic) and Goldfinger (Eon/United Artists, 1964) (nine weeks at the Regent) demonstrate the prevalence of long-run programming. Blockbusters with longer running times were being roadshown, often with only two sessions per day, further extending the periods in which they occupied first-run cinemas. The system was running more slowly at 221

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the front end, emphasizing the relationships between distributors and exhibition circuits that dictated the flow of films to scarcer screens. Fox and United Artists films played at Hoyts, while Columbia, Universal, and Paramount played at the three GU houses, and Paramount also had exclusive use of the Majestic. MGM maintained its ownership of the Metro cinema, which still screened MGM films exclusively. If we look to cinema closings, the suburbs register the most dramatic change, with both major suburban circuits absorbed by national exhibitors who heavily reduced the number of screens. GU’s Star circuit was halved from 21 cinemas in 1948 to ten by 1965, with the majority of those screening only once a week. The Ozone circuit, which had been absorbed by Hoyts in 1951, was now reduced to only four cinemas. Suburban capacity had fallen by 65 percent to just over 19,000 seats in the intervening years. This pattern of closures closely resembles that identified in Melbourne, where between 1950 and 1970 Hoyts closed a comparable proportion of its suburban venues. All of Melbourne’s CBD cinemas, on the other hand survived into the 1970s, suggesting that much of the chains’ investments “went into the city cinema’s fight for survival at the expense of the smaller and later run suburban venues” (Davidson, 2012: 178; see also Verhoeven and Arrowsmith, 2014: 124–126). This provides a more nuanced explanation of the interrelated effects on cinemagoing of television and suburbanization. First-run always entailed people traveling to movies, and this was less affected by the advent of television than suburban releasing, which relied on people waiting for films to come to them. With its ability to be consumed repeatedly and in the home, television affected regularized and localized cinema consumption more strongly. As suburban exhibition struggled for a means of survival, it combined old and new practices. The old was represented by enduring links with distributors, so that Paramount films continued to play exclusively at Star cinemas, which had been re-branded as Odeons after GU came under the control of Rank, which used the Odeon brand throughout the world. Fox films went exclusively to Hoyts in the suburbs, while Columbia appeared on both circuits. Windows between CBD and suburban screenings were still in the region of three to five weeks. Innovation could be seen in the incorporation of foreign-language (primarily Greek and Italian) films into the programming of suburban exhibition. The St Peters Capitol played Paramount’s Hatari (1962) one week, followed by MGM’s dubbed Italian Hercules, Samson and Ulysses (1963), with the following week bringing La Fortuna di Essere Donna (Documento/Columbia, 1956) advertised as “Parlata in Italiano” and clearly aimed at a diasporic audience. This last film played on a double bill with another Italian language film one week, but the next week saw it doubled with Paramount western Law of the Lawless (1964). While it is generally agreed that television is not the only factor in producing these changes, we would go further by arguing that it might not even be the most important technological innovation of the intervening period. In 1948, there were fewer than 76,000 motor vehicles registered in South Australia. By 1965, car registrations had increased more than fourfold to 345,000, a change perhaps associated with Adelaide becoming a center for car manufacturing with General Motors and Chrysler both being attracted to the city in the early 1960s (South Australian Yearbook, 1967). Public transport use halved during the same period, falling from 270 to 130 trips per year for each urban inhabitant. With the expansion of car ownership came drive-ins, which established institutional changes that were to have an enduring effect on film exhibition. Drive-ins reflected a process in which the radially centered city was pulled inside out as the diffusion of motor cars transformed urban space, evacuating the center of its resident population (the population of Adelaide’s CBD began to drop from 35,000 in 1958 to a low of 11,400 by 1993). Drive-ins were located close to major roads on the fringes of cities that were expanding outwards as 222

Three moments of cinema exhibition Table 17.1  D  rive-ins and population, 1965

Western Australia South Australia Victoria Queensland Tasmania New South Wales

Drive-ins

Population per drive-in

60 34 47 20 4 17

13,668 31,312 68,807 80,769 94,777 254,431

suburban development gained momentum. Drive-ins used a lot of land, and therefore sought out cheaper greenfield areas. Adelaide’s first drive-in, the Blueline, opened in December 1954, and by 1965 the city had twelve drive-ins with a combined capacity of over 6,500 cars. Table 17.1 shows that Western Australia and South Australia took up drive-ins with much greater enthusiasm than the larger eastern states, in part because of the availability of suitable sites near population hubs. Diane Collins (1987: 227) writes that drive-ins provided “most unwelcome competition for the many existing cinemas that were already fighting for survival.” Initially, however, they neither simply replaced suburban cinemas nor slotted in as a third release platform behind them. While we are used to generalizations that drive-ins programmed either for families, or for teens receptive to exploitation films, or for soft-core sex films, little of this is based on empirical research into programming policies. Ben Goldsmith’s (1999: 158) overview of Australian drive-ins goes on to suggest that screen content was of less importance than other “attractions” offered by the outdoor experience. An analysis of actual programming reveals a disruption in the steady cascade of the run/zone/clearance system. In 1965, most of the films screening at Adelaide drive-ins were very old, dating from the 1950s and early 1960s. In April 1965, the HiLine drive-in screened That Touch of Mink (Universal, 1962), Lancelot and Guinevere (Rank/Universal, 1963), The Wrong Arm of the Law (Romulus, 1963), The Bulldog Breed (Rank, 1960), Fun in Acapulco (Paramount, 1963), To Kill a Mockingbird (­Universal, 1962), and Bengal Brigade (Universal, 1954). The 1941 Tarzan’s Secret Treasure (MGM) rounded out one double bill. Virtually all the films had completed their suburban release well over a year previously. As in 1948, the notable exception here was MGM. With the introduction of drive-ins, MGM continued its policy of exhibition ownership, opening the Metro drive-in in the southern suburbs. MGM routinely opened films simultaneously in their CBD cinema and suburban drive-in, as well as two other drive-ins the company programmed, the Harbourline and the Valleyline. We can thus see three different clearance systems operating at the same time. The inherited system saw the one-month window between CBD and suburban release, although given the paucity of suburban cinemas, subsequent release was now relatively meager. The process of first run becoming the only theatrical run had begun. Second, MGM disrupted windows through simultaneous city and suburban drive-in release. At the other extreme, the other drive-ins programmed older films, with no stable clearance connection to recent release (Figure 17.3). Let us very briefly examine two examples of 1965 releasing. Roustabout (1964), ­Paramount’s Elvis Presley vehicle, opened at the Majestic with a five-week run ending on 8 April. Its ­suburban debut was at the Glenelg Odeon on 30 April. By contrast MGM’s The Yellow Rolls Royce (1964) opened simultaneously on 19 March at the Metro CBD cinema and 223

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Figure 17.3  M ap of Adelaide drive-in locations, 1965

drive-in. It ran four weeks in city release, simultaneously screening at the Metro drive-in for three of those weeks, as well as the Valleyline and Harbourline drive-ins for a single week. It played no suburban “hardtop” engagements at all. One of the crucial areas of innovation associated with drive-ins was that they brought new exhibition circuits into being: most famously, the Village company in Victoria, which went 224

Three moments of cinema exhibition

on to become a vertically integrated company with global ambitions. In South Australia, the new exhibition entrant was Wallis Theatres, a company that started out selling refrigeration units to cinemas before moving into exhibition itself. Wallis came to dominate drive-in exhibition in the state, opening six suburban venues and another six country drive-ins from 1954 onwards. While Wallis’s genesis was associated with drive-ins, it was to outlive that platform and become an enduring component of the state’s exhibition sector into the present day.

Moment 3: 2014 As we noted at the outset, film exhibition seems to be very different now, with only one cinema left in Adelaide’s CBD by 2010. We are, however, now in a position to better understand these differences in relation to processes highlighted in previous sections. Before leaping forward fifty years from 1965, it will be useful to provide an overview of changes in the intervening period. We have seen that in the 1960s, with the decimation of suburban cinemas, hardtop exhibition contracted around first-run CBD releasing. The switch to long runs disrupted this form of exhibition by congesting available venues. The solution was either subdividing auditoria (an option taken up by Hoyts when it transformed the Regent into three screens in 1968) or building the first wave of multi-screen complexes with three to six screens – the path chosen by GU and Wallis, when they opened their Hindley and Academy complexes in 1975 and 1980, respectively. All of these CBD complexes closed between 2004 and 2008. Like many medium-sized cities, the bulk of Adelaide’s screens are now found in multiplexes located in outer suburbs and satellite communities. Rather than being a sudden change, this is a continuation of the move to multi-screen complexes that gained momentum in the late 1960s to speed up first release, spliced together with two developments outlined in the previous section: the process of pulling the radial city inside out and the expansion of the motor car as the key transport technology associated with film exhibition. South Australia now has treble the number of motor vehicles registered in 1965, despite its population increasing by only 58 percent. Passenger vehicle registrations in the state now exceed one million: a rate of 623 per 1,000 people, one of the highest figures in Australia (South Australian Yearbook, 1967). Where transport factors once favored the CBD, the cost and difficulty of car parking now militate against it. This increase in motor vehicles makes the disappearance of drive-ins seem paradoxical. Just as television is usually invoked to explain the decline of cinema exhibition, the diffusion of home video is often linked to the decline of drive-ins. However, the logic that explains the rise of drive-ins also accounts for their demise. As they were linked to the outward expansion of cities and based on cheap greenfield sites on urban fringes, drive-ins became unviable as property prices rose. Using large amounts of increasingly valuable real estate to watch films in cars during evening hours was not sustainable. Watching films in cars has evolved into using cars so that films can be watched in more spatially efficient auditoria. With more than 90 percent of patrons travelling to cinemas by car (Wallis Survey), the key locational factor for multiplexes has become the availability of parking, a factor used in determining the overall seating capacity of venues.4 Although public transport use has continued to fall from 130 trips per person in 1965 to 49 per person in 2014, shopping malls still draw audiences to the multiplexes by functioning as public transport hubs. There remain strong underlying continuities with 1948 exhibition, which clustered cinemas in retail and entertainment precincts accessible by the dominant forms of transport. Other continuities with 1948 persist. We have seen that drive-ins initially disrupted the run-zone-clearance system. The replacement of drive-ins by other platforms such as video, 225

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subscription streaming, and pay television has once more allowed films to cascade discontinuously through a series of release platforms where diminishing prices encourage repeat consumption. This has been achieved by accelerating the process identified in 1965 of building theatrical revenues more centrally around a single-run system of theatrical release which, although it only accounts for less than a quarter of revenues, retains its importance as a key determinant of revenues in subsequent release platforms. Multiplexes, first in CBDs and now in suburban shopping malls, represent what Charles Acland (2008) calls an accelerated ­cinema, a temporal intensification of first run, solving the problem of blockages caused by long runs of the 1960s by opening films in more and smaller auditoria. First run releasing still clusters, now within a single complex rather than at a range of competing co-located cinemas: a kind of spatial intensification. Consequently, the d­ istributor– exhibitor relationships we have previously seen have been redirected along other axes. All multiplexes will generally play all major release films. Negotiations now involve subtler distinctions such as the number of screens and guarantees as to the length of run (Epstein, 2010: 39). This has led to writers such as Edward Jay Epstein picturing multiplexes as homogenized spaces designed for the consumption of increasingly homogenized commodities. In order to test this assumption, this final section focuses on the Wallis circuit. While Wallis’ initial growth was associated with drive-ins, it now retains only one drive-in and concentrates its activities on four suburban multiplexes, comprising 22 screens and a total capacity of just under 5,000 seats. The circuit has close to 30 percent of screen share in South Australia, which translates to $A20 million annually.5 Given that Wallis is not a national circuit, it has not been able to build relationships with the largest shopping mall operators in Australia, but has instead developed opportunistically, leasing its inner-suburban Mitcham site from a mid-size shopping center redevelopment, and acquiring its own sites in outer-suburban Noarlunga and Mt Barker. The Piccadilly is the only long-term holding, a large cinema dating to the 1940s (when it was the North Adelaide Ozone), which it has split into three auditoria (Figure 17.4). Box office data and customer surveys allow for a study of distinction concerning contemporary multiplexes. Historical proximity gives the advantage of permitting the study of audience behavior to identify fine-grained differences in audience preference. Our examination of the top-grossing films at each of Wallis’ sites over a twelve-month period in 2013–2014 revealed a remarkable variability. The Wallis circuit box-office generally reflected national rankings in that the five highest-grossing films were the same. There was, however, a reversed emphasis, with animated films (Despicable Me 2 and Frozen, both 2013) being more popular than action films (Iron Man 3, Catching Fire and The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug, all 2013) in Wallis venues. As Table 17.2 demonstrates, these ranking discrepancies become much wider further down the list. The strongest examples are films such as The Great Gatsby (2013) (ranked first and second at Mitcham and North Adelaide but tenth and 27th at Mt Barker and Noarlunga), Philomena (2013) (ranked first at North Adelaide, sixth at Mitcham, ninth at Mt Barker but only 36th at Noarlunga), and Fast and Furious 6 (2013) (ranked eighth at both Noarlunga and Mt Barker but 22nd and 31st at North Adelaide and Mitcham). These rankings indicate a rough distinction between the preferences of audiences at inner suburban Mitcham and North Adelaide on the one hand, and outer suburban Mt Barker and (more strongly) Noarlunga on the other. Adventure and animation films performed better at the outer suburban cinemas, while drama films were stronger at the inner suburban cinemas, but underperformed at the outer suburbs. Biography, romance, war, and history films had a stronger, if still quite marginal, appeal at the inner suburban cinemas, but almost no appeal at Noarlunga. Against the assumption that all multiplexes are the same, we would distinguish between inner and outer suburban multiplexes on the basis of audience preferences and practices. 226

Three moments of cinema exhibition

Figure 17.4  M ap of Wallis cinema multiplex locations

This insight has been confirmed by subsequent patron surveys carried out at Wallis cinemas in 2015.6 Mitcham drew its audiences from Adelaide’s inner southern suburbs, while North Adelaide drew its audiences mainly from the inner northern suburbs. Audiences at these two cinemas travelled in the median range of 6.4–8.8 kilometers to attend the cinema. By contrast, the two outer suburban cinemas drew their audiences from a larger geographic area extending outwards to the satellite bedroom communities and rural surrounds of the city. The audience at these cinemas was prepared to travel twice as far (in the range of 11.2–20.7 kilometers). Both the Mt Barker and Noarlunga cinemas are located at the city edge of their audience catchment areas and appear to act as relay points, connecting widely spread groups in satellite towns to urban leisure facilities. In keeping with the notion of turning the radial city inside out, these outer suburban multiplexes seem to have taken over aspects of the role played by CBD cinemas in 1948. They are the cinemas that people are prepared to travel beyond their immediate neighborhoods to attend and, in keeping with our understanding of cinemagoing as involving more than just the consumption of films, they link people to a range of services associated with urban living. 227

Mike Walsh, Richard Maltby, and Dylan Walker Table 17.2  Top twenty grossing films for the period from 7 February 2013 to 12 February 2014 National ranking Film title 4 5 1 2 3 8 10 6 28 21 16 26 7 22 20 14 17 13 9 25

Despicable Me 2 Frozen Iron Man 3 Hunger Games: Catching Fire Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug The Croods Monsters’ University The Great Gatsby Philomena The Book Thief Now You See Me Cloudy With A Chance Fast & Furious 6 Secret Life of Walter Mitty The Heat World War Z Star Trek Into Darkness The Hangover 3 Man of Steel Turbo

Wallis total

Mitcham

Piccadilly

Mt Barker

Noarlunga

1 2 3 4 5

2 3 7 5 4

5 12 3 4 9

1 3 4 6 2

1 2 5 6 7

6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20

11 8 1 6 9 10 15 31 12 26 21 18 25 16 32

7 10 2 1 6 8 28 22 20 13 18 17 11 16 33

5 7 10 9 11 14 12 8 17 13 18 19 20 27 16

3 4 27 35 16 15 9 8 20 12 13 17 14 22 10

Understanding the differences between audiences in each of the Wallis multiplexes is crucial to the programming decisions of its management. Wallis’s programmer, Bob Parr, deliberately programs to each venue’s audiences: Noarlunga is definitely family audience. This weekend Robocop will be the best film down there whereas at Mitcham it’ll be probably number five film. … Mitcham has got an older demographic, and that’s why the day trade here is the best of any of our theatres. … they’re older people who want to go out but be home for tea. … [At Mitcham] I’m very careful sometimes to put some of those smaller films in if we can fit them in, because we have a discerning audience. It’s not an art-house, it’s a commercial theatre. (Interview with Bob Parr)7 Our audience survey, conducted over two weeks in April 2015, indicated that audiences were older than usually assumed, with a median age of 33, and were 60 percent female. Two-thirds of the survey participants also reported that they attended the cinema about once a month. While these demographic results may have been influenced by the time of the survey and the particular feature in release during the survey period, we propose that this last finding indicates something about audience practice and its influence on programming. We suggest that the theaters are catering to a number of taste publics, who no doubt in part overlap but are also discrete, and are almost certainly more finely granulated than the crude demographic “quadrants” used by distributors to divide the audience by age (over or 228

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under 25) and gender. If, as our survey indicates, these discrete groups attend roughly once a month, this indicates the frequency with which they seek to be provided with product tailored to their tastes. Such a situation resembles Classical Hollywood’s practice of providing “a range of products that would appeal to different fractions of the audience, and [including] a set of ingredients that, between them, would appeal to the entire range of different audience fractions” (Maltby, 2001: 25).

Conclusion A founding premise of this study has been that film exhibition changes, and yet this change is rarely sudden or disjunctive. We have sought to explain the changes in Adelaide film exhibition in terms of underlying factors and processes, involving the behavior of both the cinema industry and audiences, and with our attention directed as much towards continuities as disruptions. In taking a long-term view of exhibition history by contrasting three moments spanning seven decades, we have also sought to explore different explanations for change, in particular considering the way in which underlying factors in urban development and transportation have driven changes in exhibition practice. Our study thus attempts to draw broader conclusions from across a significantly longer period than the microhistories that provide its evidence might otherwise allow. The broadest of these conclusions is that the way in which cinema relates to other practices, especially transport practices, has been insufficiently acknowledged in histories of cinema exhibition, and that these histories can usefully be seen as component parts of larger historical geographies of urban development (Badcock and Urlich Cloher, 1981). By contrast, we would argue, the determining role of new cinematic technologies has been overemphasized, in large part because of the limited perspective within which exhibition history has been formulated (Bordwell, 2013: 102–130). Our second general conclusion is that, in each of the periods considered, it is necessary to understand cinema audiences as social pluralities, who live, work and entertain themselves in particular locations marked by multiple social and economic differences. If we seek to view exhibition as a transaction between films and audiences, and therefore to examine the proposition that different box office responses stem not only from differences in the quality of the films exhibited, we also need to consider how these variations might be linked to differences in the composition of the potential audience. That task presents a range of challenges and opportunities for cinema historians and urban geographers. Our third conclusion, more familiar from microhistorical work, is that in each of the periods we have examined, the picture of the relationship between distributors and exhibitors has proven to be more diverse than it is usually represented. Distributors in 1948 did not move their films through the run/zone/clearance system in the same way as each other; drive-ins in 1965 operated at a tangent to the flow of films from first to subsequent run; Wallis’ 2013–2014 programming involves negotiations with distributors based on the circuit management’s detailed local knowledge of their multiple audiences. While we will not rashly extrapolate from the localized evidence summarized here, we nevertheless doubt that, for example, MGM’s distribution practices were restricted either to South Australia or to the late 1940s, or that the screening practices of Adelaide’s drive-ins were unique to that city, since many of these decisions were made from head offices located in Sydney and reflected nationwide policies. These findings suggest opportunities for comparative research that will add to our broader understanding of the distinctions among distribution and exhibition practice in different periods. 229

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Finally, we also conclude that our study has demonstrated continuities as much as differences. An exhibition history not driven by descriptions of technological novelty or disruption can observe the similarities across time of audience behavior or cinema location, just as it recognizes the different conditions under which they occur.

Notes 1 The CAARP database (www.caarp.edu.au) has been developed through two research projects funded by the Australian Research Council, designed to investigate practices of film exhibition and reception in relation to changing patterns of Australian community, identity, consumption, and the fabric of everyday life. The database was initially built around two key research projects: an investigation into the post-war cinema enterprises built by Greek and Italian migrants and a study of the transition from silent to sound cinema focused in Adelaide and surrounds. Subsequent data capturing venues and screenings in Sydney in the 1930s and Melbourne in the 1960s has been added. The Australian Cinemas Map website (http://auscinemas.flinders.edu. au/) contains information about the location of film exhibition in Australia in the period from 1948 to 1971, using material from the Annual Reports of Film Weekly, Australia’s national trade publication. 2 The transcript of testimony to the Royal Commission can be found at National Archives of ­Australia, Bound printed copy of Minutes of Evidence of the Royal Commission on the Moving Picture Industry in Australia, 1927–28, NAA Series Number NA11636. http://recordsearch.naa.gov.au/ SearchNRetrieve/Interface/ViewImage.aspx?B=3009445 [Accessed 29 November 2018] 3 It is possible that one print was screened in more than one cinema on the same night, with reels being transported between cinemas. According to exhibitor Brian Miller, this practice of ‘switching’ films was sufficiently standard in Melbourne for Hoyts to issue a 36-page handbook to cinema managers describing how it should be organized (Verhoeven, 2011: 248). 4 Minutes of the Council of the City of Holdfast Bay, Glenelg, South Australia, 22 May 2012, www. holdfast.sa.gov.au/webdata/resources/minutesAgendas/Council%20Minutes%20-%2012-05-22. pdf [Accessed 29 November 2018] 5 http://w w w.businessinfocus.com.au/index.php/2014/04/wallis-cinemas/  [Accessed  29 November 2018] 6 These surveys were carried out in April, 2015 by Screen and Media students from Flinders University. The results of the surveys are discussed in Maltby, Walker, and Walsh (2018). 7 Interview with Bob Parr, conducted by Mike Walsh and Dylan Walker at Wallis Cinema, ­M itcham on 27August 2011.

References Acland, Ch. (2008) “Theatrical Exhibition: Accelerated Cinema.” In P. McDonald and J. Wasko (eds.) The Contemporary Hollywood Film Industry. Malden, MA: Blackwell (pp. 83–105). Badcock, B.A. and Urlich Cloher, D.U. (1981) “Neighbourhood Change in Inner Adelaide, 1966–76.” Urban Studies 18: 41–55. Bordwell, D. (2013) Pandora’s Digital Box: Films, Files, and the Future of Movies. Madison, WI: Irvington Way Institute Press. Collins, D. (1987) Hollywood Down Under. North Ryde: Angus and Robertson. Davidson, A. (2012) A Method for the Visualisation of Historical Multivariate Spatial Data. Unpublished PhD thesis, RMIT University, Melbourne. Epstein, E.J. (2010) The Hollywood Economist. Brooklyn, NY: Melville House. Film Weekly (1964–65) Motion Picture Directory. Sydney: Film Weekly. Goldsmith, B. (1999) “‘The Comfort Lies in All the Things You Can Do’: The Australian Drive-In – Cinema of Distraction.” Journal of Popular Culture 33(1): 153–164. Maltby, R. (2001) “Hicks, Stick and Flaps: Classical Hollywood’s Generic Conception of Its Audience.” In M. Stokes and R. Maltby (eds.) Identifying Hollywood’s Audiences, London: British Film Institute (pp. 23–41).

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Three moments of cinema exhibition Maltby, R., Walker, D. and Walsh, M. (2018) “The Seat of Bob Parr’s Pants 1: Intuition, Programming and the Local Cinema Circuit.” Participations 15(2) http://www.participations.org/Volume%2015/ Issue%202/contents.htm [Accessed 30 November 2018]. South Australian Year Book No. 2 (1967) Adelaide: Commonwealth Bureau of Census and Statistics South Australian Office. South Australian Parliamentary Papers: Blue Book 1949 (1950) Adelaide: Government Printer. Ulin, J. (2010) The Business of Media Distribution. Burlington, MA: Focal Press. Verhoeven, D. (2011) “Film Distribution in the Diaspora: Temporality, Community and National Cinema.” In R. Maltby, D. Biltereyst, and Ph. Meers (eds.) Explorations in New Cinema History: Approaches and Case Studies. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell (pp. 243–260). Verhoeven, D. and Arrowsmith, C. (2014) “Mapping the III-Disciplined? Spatial Analyses and Historical Change in the Postwar Film Industry.” In J. Hallam and L. Roberts (eds.) Locating the Moving Image: New Approaches to Film and Place. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press (pp. 106–129). Walker, D. (1996) Adelaide’s Silent Nights: A Pictorial History of Adelaide’s Picture Theatres During the Silent Era 1896–1929. Canberra: National Film and Sound Archive. Walsh, M. (2015) “The Film Exhibitors’ Royal Commission.” Studies in Australasian Cinema 9(3): 271–282.

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18 Currents of empire Transport, electricity, and early film exhibition in colonial Indonesia Dafna Ruppin In March 1897, a reporter from Bandung, an inland city of tree-lined boulevards and ­fountains in Central Java soon to be called “the Paris of Java,” offered the following survey of the local popular entertainment scene: Bandung cannot complain of the inconveniences of an isolated life, as many inland cities in Java have reason to. Traveling artists and impresarios occasionally come here to give shows and spectacles of amusements in various fields, after first appearing and being tested in Batavia – the “pick of the bunch.” … Among the above spectacles are many that one will never get to see in a Dutch provincial town. Where has one in the rural provinces seen a Scenimatograph at work, as Mr. Talbot has shown us here on the 24th? (“Nederlandsch-Indië,” Java Bode, 29 March 1897)1 This may have been a correct estimate on the journalist’s part. Although the first Lumière films were screened in Amsterdam in March 1896 (Blom, 2003: 37) and moving pictures were popularized at fairgrounds and vaudeville shows over the next few years, filmgoing in the Netherlands never really took off to the extent it did in other European countries before the First World War (van der Velden and Thissen, 2010: 453). Consequently, the Dutch were not primary exporters of films to colonial Indonesia (known at the time as the Netherlands Indies) in the early days of cinema. Nevertheless, as the above quotation suggests, thanks to the efforts of other traveling entrepreneurs moving pictures were introduced and popularized in the Indies almost in parallel with these processes in the West. Until recently, the prevailing image of colonial Indonesia’s early film market was of a dumping ground where old, degraded film copies from Europe or the US could be shipped for their final on-screen runs (Blom, 2003: 2013; Thompson, 1985: 40). Traditionally focusing on national film production, Indonesian film history largely neglected the first decades of cinema and began only with the late 1920s, when Indonesians themselves became involved in narrative filmmaking (see Abdullah, Biran, and Ardan, 1993; Biran, 2009; Tjasmadi, 2008). Recent research on early film exhibition in the region, however, reveals that colonial Indonesia had a lively moviegoing scene from very early on. The first commercial screenings found in this research were given by the abovementioned Louis Talbot, a French photographer operating a studio in the capital Batavia (present-day Jakarta), in October 1896 – just 232

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ten months after the famous Cinématographe Lumière screenings in Paris (Advertisement, Java-Bode, 9 October 1896).2 A decade later, in 1907, there were reportedly 35 companies touring Java alone, holding shows up to three times a day in bamboo structures accommodating thousands of spectators (“Bioscoopconcurrentie,” Nieuwe Soerabaja Courant, 16 August 1907). By the early 1910s, brick and stone cinema houses were constructed in cities and towns across the Indonesian archipelago. European men with (or without) their wives and/or children, middle-income Javanese families, Chinese stall owners and single Chinese women, Eurasian office workers, drunken soldiers and sailors, and orphaned children, among others, all swarmed into such venues. Seating was priced and ordered by racial, social, and economic class, with seats sold under the category of “Natives” located either in the upstairs gallery, right in front of the screen, in what became known as the kambing (literally, goat) class, or behind the screen (see further in Ruppin, 2016, 2017).3 The latter layout would have been familiar to spectators in the Indies from the wayang kulit ( Javanese shadow play). Moving pictures, shipped on nearly a weekly basis, brought them images from the streets of Paris and Vienna, vivid impressions of current events, as well as comedies and dramas. Occasionally, local views captured by local cameramen also featured on film programs, showcasing local festivals and customs alongside scenes of development and progress, such as tramways, steamships and modern industry in the Indies. Even people in the Netherlands at the time would have been surprised to learn of cinema’s popularity and well-developed infrastructure in the Indies, as a 1913 report in the ­A msterdam-based trade weekly De Kinematograaf claimed. However, as the article continued: To the connoisseur of conditions in the Indies, this fact may seem less strange, since the path of the cinema there was already fully paved in advance. The Europeans living there, as well as the natives had hitherto little pleasure to taste, as the circumstances linked to the establishment and installation of an entertainment venue always carry with them the danger of not being profitable and usually the enterprise even results in failure. The cinema, however, quickly and easily obtained a foothold, and where once only dull tents stood with the ringing name “Cinema Theatre,” it has now elevated itself to proud palaces, which conform to the most modern demands. Europeans and natives have become the loyal visitors of the Photoplay [Lichtbeelden] Theatre, and the Chinese, the ­Malays and the Javanese are already fanatic about your cinema darlings and “World Stars.” (“Het Bioscooptheater in onzen Oost,” De Kinematograaf, 1913: 254) Keeping in mind that “every screening was the successful outcome of negotiations exchanged by mail, telegraph or telephone, and a sequence of physical journeys by … sea, road and rail, in order to enable … the delivery of a film print” (Maltby, 2011: 16–17), this chapter considers the “conditions in the Indies” that paved the way for the cinema. In the process, the cinema is perceived as a social institution in which technology, race, and colonialism converged, forming part of the everyday life experiences of colonial Indonesia’s multi-ethnic audiences – the “loyal visitors” of the Indies’ cinema houses. In turn-of-the-century colonial Indonesia, railways built by the Dutch authorities connected plantations and mines in the hinterlands to port cities, facilitating internal and global trade while simultaneously enabling efficient deployment of colonial troops (Taylor, 2013: 35). These “tools of empire” (Headrick, 1981), along with communication networks, steamships, newspapers, and electricity grids, were also utilized by traveling exhibitors of moving pictures who were, like other turn-of-the-century commercial entertainments, “parasitic of 233

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the colonial state” (Cohen, 2006: 24). The urban centers of the archipelago became a transit zone for touring artists of various origins, including American magicians, British and Indian circus troupes, visiting and locally grown komedi stambul or bangsawan companies (popular Malay opera), Japanese and Australian acrobats, and French and Austrian operetta performers (see Cohen, 2006: 1–27). According to Nadi Tofighian’s assessment of the wider region, Southeast Asia’s system of trade and communication networks enabled the establishment of “a circuit of transnational [troupes and entertainers…]. Early film exhibitors and film reels [merely] followed this circuit” (2013: 61). By drawing on a variety of primary sources, including Dutch- and Malay-language newspapers, government documents, travelogues, guidebooks, and archival maps and photographs held in libraries and archives in the Netherlands and in Indonesia, this chapter examines how infrastructure, originally constructed to benefit the work of empire, both facilitated and constrained the paths that itinerant exhibitors took during the first decade of moving picture shows in colonial Indonesia. It compares the well-connected main island of Java and the topographically challenging Sumatra by examining the routes exhibitors took. It also reflects on the uneven diffusion of technology, which meant that colonial cities with high concentrations of Europeans were first to receive tramways, street lighting, telephone exchanges and cinema projectors. Moving between the macro-level of international trade networks, used to transport exhibitors and film reels, and the micro-level of urban transport systems, utilized by local spectators to attend their venue of choice, this chapter considers how such infrastructure propelled “the spatiality of the experience of cinema” (Klenotic, 2011: 61).

Rail and steamship The opening of the Suez Canal in 1869 and the rapid introduction of steam shipping slashed the journey time between Europe and the Netherlands Indies to only a matter of “three or four weeks” (van Bemmelen and Hooyer, 1903 [1897]: 8). As Eliza Scidmore’s 1897 guidebook explained, the Dutch mail-steamers to and from Batavia connect with the English mail-­steamers at Singapore; a French line connects with the Messagerie’s ships running between ­Marseilles and Japan; an Australian line of steamers gives regular communication; and independent steamers … leave Singapore almost daily for Batavia [taking about ­forty-eight hours]. (Scidmore, 1897: 7) Steamships were also able to keep more regular schedules since they were less subject to the tropical weather conditions of the equatorial archipelago than sailing ships (Veering, 2015: 216). These were important factors for moving picture entrepreneurs, who relied on regular shipments of film stock. Unlike other entertainers who chose to step down during the monsoon months because of low attendance figures (Cohen, 2006: 92),4 moving picture exhibitors were active all year round, possibly seeing this as an opportunity to make some money by occupying the empty slot left by other performers. A reliable transport system would have become even more important once more permanent venues, which had to keep regular schedules, were set up around 1907. Tofighian’s findings exemplify how early film distribution in Southeast Asia relied on global and local trade networks, dividing the market’s development into roughly three 234

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phases. During the first phase, from 1896 to 1903, itinerant exhibitors bought films directly from offices in Europe and the US and used this stock for their traveling shows. Tofighian characterizes the second phase, beginning in 1904, as an “inter-Asian film trade,” as corporations and commercial shops in the region began to trade in films alongside their dealings in other products. The third stage began in August 1907, when Pathé Frères opened its subsidiary office in Singapore, distributing films across the entire region (Tofighian, 2013: 136). A year later, Pathé stationed an agent in Batavia to handle its film trade in the Netherlands Indies (Advertisement, Java-Bode, 7 September 1908). In addition, local exhibitors in the Indies were themselves offering film stock for sale or exchange, in order to revitalize their selection of films. Examining the developments in the field of transportation and their implementation in Southeast Asia quickly reveals that colonial Indonesia was at the forefront of modern modes of transportation in Southeast Asia and on the frontier of this field’s technology internationally. Southeast Asia’s first railway, connecting Java’s productive interior to the three main north coast ports of Batavia, Semarang and Surabaya, opened in 1867, the same year as Japan’s first railway (Dick and Rimmer, 2003: 59–61). Railways in other parts of Southeast Asia were not introduced until the 1880s and 1890s (see Table 18.1). The first automobiles arrived in Java in 1894, Singapore in 1896, Bangkok in 1897, North Sumatra in 1902 and Rangoon (Yangon) in 1905 (Dick and Rimmer, 2003: 66). Horse trams began operating in Batavia in 1869, followed by Manila (1881), Tokyo (1882) and Bangkok (1889), while the more comfortable and reliable steam tram followed in Batavia in 1882, Singapore (1885), Surabaya (1889) and Penang (1893) (Dick and Rimmer, 2003: 69). An electric tram was running in Batavia in April 1899, three months before the first line in the Netherlands (Dick and Rimmer, 2003: 70). The wide availability of these modes of transport partially explains why itinerant exhibitors found colonial Indonesia to be an attractive location. Java, the most highly populated island, also had by far the most extensive railway and tramway coverage among the islands under Dutch control. By 1909 this mostly government-owned rail network ran a total length of 2,170 kilometers, providing excellent coverage especially in Central and Eastern Java (Wright, 1909: 190). Railway-building on Sumatra, however, did not even attempt to unite the whole island and basically served three separate regions. The northern Sumatra network, begun at different ends of the island in the 1880s, was finally completed only in 1916. The southern line was fully joined together only in 1927, while a third smaller network developed in West Sumatra from the 1880s. These three distinct networks were never linked, and it was left to road transport to accomplish the unification of the island (Reid, 2005: 29). Table 18.1  L ength of railways (kilometer) in Southeast Asia

British Malaya French Indochina Netherlands Indies Philippines Siam (Thailand)

1890

1895

1900

1905

1910

56 71 1,593

261 171 2,098 196*

417 182 3,574 196

678 894 4,728 196

867 1,717 5,145 206

94*

125

457

896

* Data for the year 1898. Source: based on data from Mitchell, 2007: 723–725.

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At the same time, travel and transportation modes were not always reliable. Trains could run late and often did not have a fixed schedule. One entrepreneur who arrived ahead of time in order to set up his venue in Magelang in Central Java found out a week later that his films were still on their way from Malang in Eastern Java, and would not arrive in time for the opening show (“Magelang,” De Locomotief, 22 September 1909). Important pieces of luggage were at risk of going amiss during railway journeys: one variety showman traveling with his Edison Bioscope lost his performing ape when its cage fell off the train on Sumatra (Advertisement, Sumatra Post, 27 July 1907). Steamships were sometimes delayed for days, or even sunk while carrying equipment, as happened to an exhibitor traveling from Surabaya to Makassar (on Sulawesi) who had not bothered to insure his device and films (“Uit Macassar,” Het Nieuws van den Dag voor Nederlandsch-Indië, 11 March 1911). Traveling exhibitors clearly preferred to tour Java, which could be covered efficiently by railway. Although the Netherlands Indies had a reputation among travelers as an expensive tourist destination in terms of living and travel costs, the railways on Java were said to have “greatly reduced tourist expenses, so that they [were] not now two or three times the average of similar expenses in India, China, and Japan” (Scidmore, 1897: 8). Many exhibitors who wanted to cover extensive portions of the island would follow the route taken by Louis Talbot. His tour from March to August 1897 included Batavia, ­Buitenzorg (Bogor), Cianjur, ­Bandung, Sukabumi, Garut, Purworejo, Yogyakarta, Klaten, Solo (­Surakarta), ­Semarang, Kudus, Pati, Juwana, and Surabaya, where he started to make his way back west via more shows in Solo, Yogyakarta and Bandung until returning to ­Batavia (“­Nederlandsch-­Indië,” Java-Bode, 19 March 1897; “Nederlandsch-Indië,” De Nieuwe Vorstenlanden, 7 May 1897;  “Jogjakarta,” Mataram, 17 May 1897; “Nederlandsch-Indië,” De Preanger-Bode, 12 July 1897). Although this is by no means an exhaustive list, it sets a clear trend since all these destinations could be reached by railway or narrow gauge tramway connection (see ­Figure  18.1). ­Compare this to his shows on Sumatra in November and ­­ December 1897, where I have found him only on the northern part of the island, in Medan, Binjai and possibly in the Sultanate of Serdang, before departing for shows in the Straits Settlements (Advertisement, Deli-Courant, 17 November 1897; Advertisement, Deli Courant, 24 November 1897; “­Bobonganfeest,” De Locomotief, 4 January 1898; “Aangekomen en vertrokken passagiers,” Deli Courant, 22 December 1897). Another approach to touring Java was to focus on the three main port cities – Batavia, Semarang and Surabaya – and to hop from one place to another by steamship rather than by railway. A train from Batavia to Surabaya, about 800 km distance across often challenging topographical terrain, would have been an overnight journey, and the single track meant trains had to wait at passing points for another train to pass. Although probably not cutting the journey time significantly, traveling by steamship was likely more straightforward, especially with cumbersome equipment. This was often done by exhibitors who were trying to add as many places to the “check-list” on their world tour, such as American magician Carl Hertz who toured with a R. W. Paul Cinematograph in South Africa, Australia, New Zealand, India, and Ceylon in 1896 and 1897. After India, he went to Rangoon and Mandelay in Burma, to Singapore for a week, ­Manila for two weeks, back to Singapore for a week, to Java and Borneo, back again to ­Singapore, Saigon for a week, Hong Kong, Shanghai for two weeks, Japan, Hawaii, and San Francisco. (Tofighian, 2013: 111)

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Figure 18.1  T  albot’s projected tour route of Java. Talbot’s projected railway tour route of Java marked in bold. Railway map adapted from Map of the Netherlands Indies, c. 1893, Courtesy of the University of Texas Libraries, The University of Texas at Austin Source: http://www.lib.utexas.edu/maps/historical/nederlandsch_indie_1893.jpg [Accessed 29 November 2018].

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As this research has found, Hertz began his tour of Java in Batavia, moving on to Semarang and Surabaya (Advertisement, Java-Bode, 5 July 1898; Advertisement, De Locomotief, 8 August 1898; Advertisement, Soerabaiasch-Handelsblad, 10 August 1898). One motivation for a swift run through Java might have been to avoid malaria, which nearly every member of Hertz’s company suffered from at one point or another of their tour. The cemetery in Batavia, as Hertz later noted in his memoir, was apparently known as “The Actors’ Graveyard” since “nearly every theatrical company which [went] there [left] someone behind” (1924: 168–169).5

Carriages and trams Spectators had their own modes of urban transport by which they could travel to cinema venues, generally located on main town squares. Europeans owned their own horses and carriages to meet their daily travel needs, and a growing number of automobiles, first imported to Java in 1894 (von Faber, 1936: 3, 202), appeared on the major cities’ streets. Vehicle ownership for Indonesians meant bicycles (Dick, 2002: 349), but most Indonesians presumably walked or used urban public transport. The twenty-kilometer steam tram line in Surabaya, Java’s most populated city at the time and a major hub of popular entertainment, was opened to the public in 1890, connecting the harbor to the city’s outskirts and running through the city once every half an hour (von Faber, 1936: 3). Steam trams in Batavia, introduced in 1882 and similarly running from the harbor through the heart of the city to its suburbs, ran alongside electric trams that followed a more circuitous route from 1899 (Abeyasekere, 1989: 445). Most patrons nevertheless presumably came from cinema venues’ neighboring surroundings. They may not have necessarily been people living in the vicinity of each venue, but possibly working nearby: port workers and navy personnel in Batavia’s harbor attending shows in the entertainment quarter of the city’s Chinatown district, or soldiers stationed in town going to cinemas on or next to military grounds in Surabaya or Semarang. Many exhibitors in fact offered free admission to residents living close to their venues. This practice was apparently common when weather conditions were particularly rainy, in order to fill up the ranks of the cinema tent, or else to avoid complaints to the local authorities from neighbors living in close vicinity to the venue about the noise coming from the cinema (“De Ripograaf,” Het Nieuws van den Dag voor Nederlandsch-Indië, 14 March 1908). Indeed, residents suddenly began to complain about the nuisance they encountered every evening from the cinema tent as soon as free admission to one of Batavia’s cinema tents was revoked after the introduction of a new tax on public amusements that limited the number of free tickets that could be handed out (“‘Overlast’,” Het Nieuws van den Dag voor Nederlandsch-Indië, 1 February 1911). A description from 1910, of a typical Saturday night in Surabaya, graphically illustrates the bustling scenes encountered around cinema venues: It’s 8 o’clock. Party-going Surabaya is in full swing. Saturday night, the last night of the week, which is followed by a free day, a Sunday, a day of rest, a day of sleeping in. … The Alun Alun [town square] is the center of Surabaya’s big city buzz. The cinemas are bathing in a sea of electric light, which expands widely between the trees, with aspects of light hitting the surrounding buildings and the asphalt of the street. Cheerful music penetrates from the silent theaters to the outside, luring one to enter. Then suddenly the music ceases, but only for a few moments; the band resumes, the music becomes sadder, melancholic, the presently projected film is indeed a drama. It’s not difficult to guess this. 238

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The number of kossongs [horse-drawn carriages], which are rolling in from all directions … increases the hustle and bustle beyond measure; the hordes of coachmen with their whips; their shouts together, their sneering laughter and their irrational conduct as they run for the entrances of Hellendoorn or Grimm [restaurants] when they spot some people getting up to leave. All this gives an extraordinary impression of the busy city life. And were there not many natives to demonstrate the contrary, one would imagine one was in Europe, in the heart of the big cities. (“Soerabaia op Zaterdagavond,” Soerabaiasch-Handelsblad, 4 July 1910, emphasis added) While the sounds from the cinemas reached the surrounding streets, the noise and commotion from the road were equally likely to penetrate the cinemas, with an inevitable effect on spectators’ viewing experience. The heavy, largely unregulated traffic, especially the presence of the steam tram in the midst of the crush of carriages, freight wagons and handcarts, served as a constant source of aggravation for shop owners and residents of this main quarter. Reports of accidents, some minor and others fatal and many involving pedestrians, appeared frequently in the newspapers of the day. At the same time, by locating their tents in strategic spots in the city, exhibitors ensured that potential customers had easy access to their venues. These venues, located among cafés and restaurants, also helped create a sense of a modern city center, on par with the great cities of Europe (see also Ruppin, 2014).

Alternating and direct currents The giant arc lamps stationed at the entrance ways to cinema venues, figured prominently in many reports of the day, thus drawing attention to yet another crucial infrastructure for traveling exhibitors and later also for semi-permanent bamboo tents. Electricity supply was introduced by the Dutch, with operational electricity networks made available in three of the major cities around the time of the introduction of moving pictures: Batavia in 1897, Medan in 1898, and Surabaya in 1900 (Dick, 2002: 262). Nevertheless, it appears that exhibitors on Java preferred to travel with their own engine and dynamo to power their tent shows, as indicated in annual government reports detailing the number of steam boilers used for moving picture shows (Koloniaal Verslag 1907–1908, Bijlage W: 2). Around 1910, according to the account of one of the region’s traveling exhibitors published in the trade journal The Kinematograph, moving picture exhibitions were …held in large well-built tents of canvas or bamboo and matting – not circular, but long and narrow on the lines of a hall and with no posts to obstruct the view. The management seems to spare no expense in making their “houses” attractive and comfortable, and the approaches are richly carpetted [sic] and lined with banks of tropical plants. Most of them have their own electric light generators, and the entrances are a veritable blaze of light. (Coulter, 1909: 1039) Traveling with their own power source increased exhibitors’ flexibility in setting up their tents in areas within these cities that were not necessarily covered by the electricity companies, which mainly served the European parts of town. It also opened up potential locations in other cities and more rural areas. Exhibitors at times also offered their services for hire to private enterprises such as sugar or rubber companies to entertain their coolies on the estates.6 These one-off shows could have 239

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been attended by anything from 1,500 to 6,000 spectators, and exhibitors either brought their own dynamo and boiler or specifically stated how much electric current they would require for their show.7 Exhibitors often employed an electrician to inspect the machinery and facilitate its smooth operation, with the electrician’s name appearing in advertisements alongside the names of the managers and agents of these touring companies. Because of electrical short circuits reportedly leading to fire at cinema venues in the Indies and in other cities around the world, the electrician’s presence was presumably intended to put spectators’ and authorities’ minds at ease about the measures taken to ensure public safety. Exhibitors in Medan and its environs on Sumatra, on the other hand, often relied on the local electricity company to provide them with alternating current (AC). Medan’s electricity company (Electriciteit-Maatschappij Medan), founded in 1898 and equipped with four diesel engines of 100 horse-power each, was awarded a Medan street-lighting contract in March 1900 (Wright, 1909: 569–570). The electric power was carried through the town on overhead wires as a high-tension single-phase alternating current of 110 volts at 44 stations situated at different points, supplying 167 private consumers in 1909, as well as industrial companies, the ice factory, and the offices of the newspapers which were printed in Medan and Binjai. (Wright, 1909: 569) The availability of electricity from the local company was a handy solution, which freed exhibitors from transporting additional heavy equipment. For instance, before traveling from Singapore to Medan, Ten Broeke’s American Biograph offered up for sale in auction its portable engine and a dynamo (Advertisements, The Straits Times and Singapore Free Press, 22  January 1899). Nevertheless, reliance on the services of the local electricity company caused problems for some exhibitors, such as Abdulally Esoofally, who struggled to optimize his New Bioscope to fit the technical conditions on site. After having to turn away ­spectators who lined up outside the tent and postponing the opening night because of problems with the electricity supply (“De bioscoop,” Sumatra Post, 7 October 1901), it was generally agreed that the projection light improved during the latter part of the evening because, as the ­Sumatra Post explained, “fewer houses were using light as the evening went on and so more electricity went to the cinema” (“De bioscoop,” Sumatra Post, 7 October 1901). The show was nevertheless recommended, “especially if, as Mr. [Esoofally] hopes, the electricity company fixes the light so that it is more powerful also at the beginning of the evening” (“De bioscoop,” Sumatra Post, 7 October 1901). That comment led Esoofally into an argument with the electricity company which ran over the pages of the newspapers for the next few days with the company claiming that the fault for the poor light quality lay with the less than perfect design of the “Biographman” (“Het licht in de bioscoop,” Sumatra Post, 9 October 1901). Esoofally’s equipment used direct current (DC) rather than the AC that the company supplied, and it lacked the right transformer. The company prepared a quick fix for Esoofally, but the result was still less than perfect.

Conclusion: “…remoteness exists only in the imagination” By focusing on the state of infrastructure set up by the Dutch authorities to contribute to the work of empire, this chapter has drawn attention to the crucial role that pre-existing transport networks and electricity grids had in introducing and popularizing moviegoing in turn-of-the-century colonial Indonesia. As this research discovered, new technologies for 240

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projecting moving images, along with the latest films on offer, arrived in far flung locations in the Netherlands Indies much earlier than previously assumed, sometimes within a matter of just weeks after their first appearance on screens in the West. While the diffusion of technologies such as railways or electricity networks was slower in the hinterlands, an itinerant film exhibitor – even with cumbersome equipment and film stock – would have surely found it easier to tour the archipelago, compared to a komedi ­stambul troupe with a cast and crew of fifty or more (Cohen, 2006: 1), or a circus with forty to seventy artists on top of an entire menagerie (Tofighian, 2013: 122). The relative mobility of early moving picture exhibitors meant that this technology had the potential of going beyond the constraints of the railroad or electricity lines and penetrating deeper inland. Occasional mentions of exhibitors traveling by other modes of transport, such as motorized vehicles, suggest that at least some of them did steer off the beaten tracks (“Waarschuwing voor automobielisten,” Nieuwe Soerabaja Courant, 23 May 1908). Moving picture shows held a certain democratizing potential, in providing a wide range of colonial society with access to new technology. “We live here in the Indies in the sign of the cinema,” a Surabaya-based newspaper wrote in 1911. “Both in the interior and in the main cities, one can always find sheds where performances are constantly being given and these shows are always well attended” (“De Transvalia Bioscope,” Soerabaiasch-­Handelsblad, 13 January 1911). Smaller towns, which usually had little to nothing by way of entertainment, came to rely on the cinema which, as a reporter from Magelang wrote, “now and then brings some variety into our monotonous existence” (“Nieuws uit Magelang,” ­Soerabaiasch-Handelsblad, 24 August 1909). At the same time, it was no secret that a certain hierarchy existed between Java and ­Sumatra, as well as between cities and towns on Java itself. For instance, when the Japanese Cinematograph visited Medan and performed a series of disappointing shows, the Sumatra Post exclaimed: We guarantee to the owner that, if he had the nerve to give such a show in one of the great cities of Java, he would have bitterly regretted it. Money back or a beating, that would be the public catchphrase. (“De Kinematograaf,” Sumatra Post, 28 August 1905) In Bondowoso, an inland town in Eastern Java, residents were similarly vexed by the “dubious pleasures” offered by a visiting “seventh tier” cinema (“Nederlandsch-Indië,” ­Soerabaiasch-Handelsblad, 14 July 1911). Yet, if Talbot were to return to Bandung in the 1920s, after dozens of other exhibitors had come and gone with the railroad, he would have found at least four permanent cinema theaters active in this inland city, possibly powered by hydro-electricity which began to be introduced in the Indies around this time. It appears then that Bandung indeed had no reason to complain about “the inconveniences of an isolated life” although other inland cities in Java, as well as probably many places back in the Netherlands, did. As a reporter in Batavia, who troubled himself to attend the opening of a cinema palace on the far end of town, observed with a sense of wonder: “During the drive to this part of town, which seems to lie so very far away, we took note that remoteness exists only in the imagination” (“Opening van de Cinema Palace,” Het Nieuws van den Dag voor Nederlandsch-Indië, 8 May 1914). Finally, more research on early cinema’s exhibition and reception in such seemingly remote territories, resembling what the historian of technology David Edgerton (2008 [2006]) calls a “history of technology-in-use” (xi), can help us broaden the traditional geography of early 241

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cinema, conventionally focused on locations in the West where moving picture technology was invented. Unlike a history of technology that prizes innovation and therefore is limited to finite dates and sites of invention, a “use-based history of technology” gives us, as Edgerton (2008 [2006]: xiii) claims, “a [global] history of technology engaged with all the world’s population, which is mostly poor, non-white and half female.” A history of moviegoing in former colonial outposts, where moving pictures were distributed and consumed, will thus enable us to map out the development of a truly global market of cinema and its spectators.

Notes 1 Unless otherwise stated, all translations from Dutch and Malay are my own. 2 See further in Ruppin (2016). The findings of Nadi Tofighian (2013) indicate that the first moving picture shows in the rest of the region all followed in 1897: Manila in January, Singapore in May, Bangkok in June and Taiping in December (pp. 73–74). His findings further corroborate that colonial Indonesia was ahead of many other countries in the region and, along with the Straits Settlements and the Federated Malay States, were the most highly frequented in Southeast Asia by touring entertainers around the turn-of-the-century (Tofighian, 2013: 248). 3 Racial classification was one of the building blocks of the Dutch colonial administration. This meant that the different groups of the population – Europeans (Europeanen), “Natives” (­Inlanders) and Foreign Orientals (Vreemde Oosterlingen) – were treated differently “in legislation, judicial practice and executive policy” (Fasseur, 1994: 31). “Natives” referred to all indigenous-born ­Indonesians, “Foreign Orientals” was used for Chinese, Arabs, Indians, and other Southeast Asians, while “Europeans” covered Europeans of various nationalities, as well as an unidentified number of Eurasians (mostly descendants of mixed unions between a “European” father and ­Indonesian mother). In 1905, there were nearly 30,000,000 “Natives,” 317,000 “Foreign Orientals” and about 65,000 “Europeans” living in Java and Madura (Furnivall, 2010 [1967]: 347), making Europeans merely 0.22 percent of the total population, most of them residing in cities. It should therefore come as no surprise that racial categories seeped into venues for consumption of popular entertainment, by way of segregated seating arrangements or separate entrance ways. 4 The wet season on Java was roughly between November and March, while in North Sumatra August was the rainiest month. The annual average of rainfall in West Java and Sulawesi and in the whole of Sumatra and Borneo, as measured in the first decade of the twentieth century, exceeded 2,000 mm, with some stations measuring at between 6,000 and 7,000 mm per annum (Braak, 1909: 304). 5 Issues of hygiene were of great concern to the Dutch authorities, and moving picture companies did not escape the ramifications of efforts to control the outbreak of diseases. Cholera led to the death of at least one exhibitor in 1902, and over the years prompted certain local authorities to opt for quarantine and refusal to hand out permits, sometimes leaving exhibitors stranded. 6 Providing amusement for the coolies on site was a common practice, also before the arrival of moving picture shows, as many estates set aside “a festival fund for the coolies, that is a certain sum of money is spent annually on their recreation, providing for musical instruments and paying for travelling shows, etc.” (Keyser, 1897: 75). 7 The Johannes Biograph advertised that it would require any interested company to provide electric current of minimum 25 and maximum 30 amperes for shows to take place during the maalfeest (the sugar factory milling festival) in 1909 (Advertisement, Soerabaiasch-Handelsblad, 1 April 1909).

References Abeyasekere, S. (1989) Jakarta: A History. Singapore: Oxford University Press. Abdullah, T., Biran, M. Y., and Ardan, S. M. (1993) Film Indonesia. Bagian I (1900–1950). Jakarta: ­Perum Percetakan Negara Ri. Biran, M. Y. (2009) Sejarah Film 1900–1950: Bikin Film di Jawa. Jakarta: Komunitas Bambu. Blom, I. (2003) Jean Desmet and the Early Dutch Film Trade. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Braak, C. (1909) “Climate of Netherlands India.” In A. Wright (ed.) Twentieth Century Impressions of Netherlands India: Its History, People, Commerce, Industries and Resources. London: Lloyd’s Greater Britain Publishing Company (pp. 303–308).

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Currents of empire Cohen, M. I. (2006) The Komedie Stamboel: Popular Theater in Colonial Indonesia, 1891–1903. Leiden: KITLV Press. Coulter, H. G. (1909) “The Kinematograph in the East.” The Kinematograph & Lantern Weekly, 4 ­February: 1039. Dick, H. W. (2002) Surabaya: City of Work: A Socioeconomic History. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press. Dick, H. and Rimmer, P. J. (2003) Cities, Transport and Communications: The Integration of Southeast Asia since 1850. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan. Edgerton, D. (2008 [2006]) The Shock of the Old: Technology and Global History Since 1900. London: Profile Books. Fasseur, C. (1994) “Cornerstone and Stumbling Block; Racial Classification and the Late Colonial State in Indonesia.” In R. Cribb (ed.) The Late Colonial State in Indonesia: Political and Economic Foundations of the Netherlands Indies 1880–1942. Leiden: KITLV Press (pp. 31–56). Furnivall, J. S. (2010 [1967]) Netherlands India: A Study of Plural Economy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Headrick, D. R. (1981) The Tools of Empire: Technology and European Imperialism in the Nineteenth Century. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Hertz, C. (1924) A Modern Mystery Merchant: The Trials, Tricks and Travels of Carl Hertz, the Famous American Illusionist. London: Hutchinson & Co. Keyser, A. (1897) From Jungle to Java. The Trivial Impressions of a Short Excursion to Netherlands India. Westminster: The Roxburghe Press. Klenotic, J. (2011) “Putting Cinema History on the Map: Using GIS to Explore the Spatiality of Cinema.” In R. Maltby, D. Biltereyst, and Ph. Meers (eds.) Explorations in New Cinema Histories: Approaches and Case Studies. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell (pp. 58–84). Maltby, R. (2011) “New Cinema Histories.” In R. Maltby, D. Biltereyst, and Ph. Meers (eds.) Explorations in New Cinema Histories: Approaches and Case Studies. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell (pp. 3–40). Mitchell, B. R. (2007) International Historical Statistics: Africa, Asia & Oceania, 1750–2005. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan. Reid, A. (2005) An Indonesian Frontier: Acehnese & Other Histories of Sumatra. Singapore: Singapore University Press. Ruppin, D. (2014) “From ‘Crocodile City’ to ‘Ville Lumière’: Cinema Spaces on the Urban Landscape of Colonial Surabaya,” Sojourn: Journal of Social Issues in Southeast Asia 29(1): 1–30. Ruppin, D. (2016) The Komedie Bioscoop: Early Cinema in Colonial Indonesia. New Barnet: John Libbey. Ruppin, D. (2017) “The Emergence of a Modern Audience for Cinema in Colonial Java.” Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde 173(4): 475–502 (special issue on the middle class in turn-of-thecentury Java). Scidmore, E. R. (1897) Java, The Garden of the East. New York, NY: The Century Co. Taylor, J. G. (2013) Global Indonesia. London: Routledge. Thompson, K. (1985) Exporting Entertainment: America in the World Film Market, 1907–34. London: British Film Institute Publishing. Tjasmadi, H. M. J. (2008) 100 tahun sejarah bioskop di Indonesia. Bandung: Megindo Tunggal Sejahtera. Tofighian, N. (2013) Blurring the Colonial Binary: Turn-of-the-Century Transnational Entertainment in Southeast Asia. PhD Dissertation. Stockholm: Stockholm University. van Bemmelen, J. F. and G. B. Hooyer (1903 [1897]) Guide to the Dutch East Indies, Compiled by order of the Koninklijke Paketvaart Maatschappij (Royal Packet Company). Translated by B. J. Berrington. New Edition revised by Otto Knaap. London/Amsterdam: Thos. Cook & Son/J. H. de Bussy. van der Velden, A. and Thissen. J. (2010) “Spectacles of Conspicuous Consumption: Picture Palaces, War Profiteers and the Social Dynamics of Moviegoing in the Netherlands, 1914–1922.” Film History 22: 453–462. Veering, A. (2015) “Breaking the Boundaries: The Uniekampong and Modernization of Dock Labour in Tanjung Priok, Batavia (1917–1949).” In F. Colombijn and J. Coté (eds.) Cars, Conduits, and ­Kampongs: The Modernization of the Indonesian City, 1920–1960. Leiden: Brill (pp. 213–247). von Faber, G. H. (1936) Nieuw Soerabaia: De Geschiedenis van Indië’s voornaamste Koopstad in de Eerste Kwarteeuw Sedert hare Instelling 1906–1931. Soerabaia/Bussum: N.V. Boekhandel en Drukkerij H. van Ingen. Wright, A. (ed.) (1909) Twentieth Century Impressions of Netherlands India: Its History, People, Commerce, Industries and Resources. London: Lloyd’s Greater Britain Publishing Company.

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19 Remembering the first movie theaters and early cinema exhibition in Quay, Smyrna, Turkey Dilek Kaya Defeated on many fronts in the First World War, the Ottoman Empire capitulated and signed a peace agreement with the Allied Powers on 30 October 1918. Marking the end of the ­Empire, the armistice opened up large tracts of Ottoman territories to the Allied ­occupation. A Turkish national resistance movement soon developed. Following the War of ­Independence (1919–1922), the abolition of the sultanate (1922), and the Treaty of ­Lausanne (24 July 1923), which gave Turkey full independence, the New Republic of Turkey was ­proclaimed on 29 October 1923, with Mustafa Kemal (Atatürk) as its first president. Aspiring to the creation of a new Turkish identity as well as a modernized, westernized ­nation-state, the republican government undertook many reforms that distanced the country from its ­Ottoman, Islamic and Eastern heritage, both administratively and ideologically. Moreover, as a coherent national identity would require as much forgetting as remembering, some reforms were also meant to foster a new national memory, among them the replacement of Arabic script by the Latin alphabet in 1928, which rendered all texts in Ottoman Turkish (written in Arabic letters) indecipherable to coming generations. Although cinema had arrived and flourished in Turkey during the late Ottoman Empire, its history was written during the Republic, when a lack of interest in the Ottoman past combined with a lack of knowledge of Ottoman Turkish and the pre-1928 sources which had been printed in it. From the early short survey histories of Turkish cinema published in the mid-1940s and 1950s (Arpad, 1959; Çalapala, 1946; Tilgen, 1951, 1953, 1956) to the first book-length studies in the 1960s (Özön, 1962, 1968), which would long be the major sources for scholars of cinema in Turkey, Turkish cinema historiography was shaped by a nationalist discourse that glorified the Turkish republican aspects of cinema’s past in Turkey while minimizing its Ottoman antecedents. This nationalist discourse is most notable in the narratives of the beginning of Turkish cinema, which situate a Muslim Turkish army officer, Fuat Uzkınay, as the first Turkish filmmaker and his 1914 documentary footage The Demolition of the Russian Monument at San Stefano as the first Turkish film. The film has not survived, and it is uncertain whether it ever existed; research suggests that the film might very well constitute Turkish cinema’s myth of origin (Mutlu, 2007a, 2007b). Although this newsreel is still widely accepted in popular discourse as the beginning of Turkish cinema, researchers now recognize that several short films documenting important events were made 244

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within Ottoman lands (stretching from the Balkans to Anatolia and Arabia) before it (Evren, 2003; Özen, 2012; Şeyben, 2006). Most of these films have, however, been excluded from Turkish cinema history, either because the identities of the filmmakers were unknown, or because they were made by non-Muslim citizens of the Ottoman Empire. For example, the 1911 documentary footage displaying Sultan Mehmed V (Reshad)’s visit to Monastir and Salonika, shot by the brothers Yanaki and Milton Manaki, who are recognized today as pioneers of photography and cinema in the Balkan Peninsula and the Ottoman Empire, has prompted debate about the origin of Turkish cinema. Arguably Turkish historians did not find this film appropriate as the beginning of Turkish cinema because the filmmakers were Christian Ottoman subjects of Vlach origin (born in the village of Avdella, near Grevena, present-day Greek Makedonia) (Bechev, 2009: 141). Their example illustrates the extent to which the history of cinema in Turkey is in fact a Turkified history that has ideologically forgotten the geographical vastness of the Ottoman Empire and the multiethnic fabric of Ottoman society (Çeliktemel-Thomen, 2013; Işığan, 2000). Against this backdrop, it can be argued that researching the history of early cinema in Turkey and attempting to (re)construct it is inevitably a political act; a political intervention into national and social memory. This is one of the motivations of this chapter. Any early cinema research in Turkey, however, faces a double challenge; not only the scarcity of archives but also, and more importantly, the indecipherable nature of the available sources written or printed in Ottoman Turkish with Arabic script. Apparently, this latter factor is among the major reasons why early cinema historiography has been the most neglected domain of historical cinema studies in Turkey (Çeliktemel-Thomen, 2013). The problems and the politics surrounding archives in Turkey (the lack of official interest in archiving, the deterioration and destruction of archives, the temporary closings of archival institutions, and the inaccessibility of some archives because of their inadequate cataloguing systems) have been an important topic of debate (Ahıska, 2006; Özel, 2012). Yet recent archive-based research on early cinema in Turkey by authors able to read Ottoman Turkish shows that, for cinema historians and researchers, a lack of knowledge of Ottoman Turkish rather than the scarcity of archival sources may be the real problem (Çeliktemel-Thomen, 2013; Mutlu, 2007b; Özen, 2008, 2010; Öztürk, 2011; Özuyar, 2004). The shortcomings of Turkish cinema historiography cannot, however, be overcome only by learning Ottoman Turkish or collaborating with researchers able to read it. Nor can they be solved simply by revisiting the archives in Turkey and abroad, or reconfiguring the dawn of Turkish cinema so as to include the contributions of non-Muslim Ottoman filmmakers. A break with the still dominant understanding of cinema in Turkey as a set of films, genres, and directors is necessary. What is urgently needed is a more comprehensive, multi-dimensional history of cinema in Turkey that also covers cinema’s economic, political, social, and cultural aspects, including issues of cinemagoing, exhibition, and reception, to better understand cinema’s broader social and cultural functions. The mid-1980s call for a new film history beyond the history of films, and their a-historical textual interpretation found many proponents in academic circles in North America and Europe. From the late 1990s to the present, a considerable quantity of empirically based historical research on previously undermined aspects of cinema, including movie theaters, film exhibition, cinemagoing, and reception, have demonstrated that cinema is a complex social phenomenon. The history of this prolific research field, which is by now labeled “new cinema history,” has been well surveyed elsewhere (Biltereyst, Lotze and Meers, 2012; Biltereyst and Meers, 2016). New cinema ­ urope that history has reached such a level of maturity in North America, Australia, and E scholars have started to call for “more systematic comparative research” in the field beyond 245

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“monocentric” studies that focus on “film exhibition and audience experiences in particular cities, neighbourhoods or venues” (Biltereyst and Meers, 2016: 13). Even the most monocentric form of new cinema history’s perspective, however, is still in its infancy in Turkey, if not totally absent (Akbulut, 2014; Aydın, 2008; Boran, 2015; Erdoğan, 2010; Liman, 2014; Öztürk, 2013). In this chapter, I will explore early cinema exhibition and the culture of cinemagoing in a geographically narrow but historically, politically, and symbolically very significant neighborhood, namely the Quay (modern-day Kordon) in Smyrna (modern-day Izmir) of the Ottoman Empire, which was under Greek occupation between May 1919 and September 1922. I will present a preliminary map of the early movie theaters of Smyrna (from their first establishment in 1908 to their end in 1922, during the infamous Great Fire of Smyrna and the Turkish recapture of the city) by situating them within the socio-cultural and political contexts in which film exhibition and cinemagoing took place. It is difficult to provide a comprehensive account of early cinema exhibition scene in Izmir, partly because of the scarcity of archives and records. A comprehensive survey of social life in Smyrna, conducted by the teachers of International American College in 1920, includes significant information about recreational conditions in the city soon before the Great Fire, including the cinema exhibition scene. The survey committee openly state, however, that “desirable statistics cannot be obtained at all, owing to lack of records in the city” (Bali, 2014: 98). In the absence of such records, the committee often relied on site visits, participant observations, and talks with people to gather information. Luckily, the survey report has itself survived. In addition to that report, this chapter benefits from information available in local newspapers, published testimonies and memories, archival websites such as levantineheritage.com, and non-cinema books and articles on pre-fire Smyrna. The findings are preliminary but hopefully will serve as a basis for further study and investigation.

Early film exhibition and movie theaters in Smyrna Located on the Aegean coast, Smyrna, since the eighteenth century, was the most important commercial port of Asia Minor (Boubougiatzi, Vamvakidou, and Kyridis, 2013: 124) and one of the most cosmopolitan port cities of the late Ottoman Empire. From the nineteenth century until the Great Fire of 1922, it was home to a mixed population of Greeks, Turks, Armenians, Jews, and Levantines (Ottoman citizens of European origin). At the beginning of the twentieth century the city’s population was about 300,000; of whom, 140,000 were Greeks (110,000 Ottoman citizens and 30,000 citizens of Greece), 90,000 Turks, 30,000 Jews, 15,000 Armenians, and 25,000 European foreigners, among whom Italians led with 10,000. By 1914, the population of the city had risen to 500,000, but its ethnic composition had not changed much. Until the Great Fire of 1922 and their expulsion from Asia M ­ inor, Greeks constituted the largest population component (64 percent), followed by Muslim Turks (30 percent), Jews (4 percent), Armenians (2 percent), and Levantines (about 2,000) (Georgelin, 2008: 48). Greeks were the dominant group economically as well as demographically (Boubougiatzi, Vamvakidou, and Kyridis, 2013: 124). The pluralistic composition of the city was reflected in the division of the city space into distinct areas, namely the Frank/European, Greek, Armenian, Turkish, and Jewish quarters. The Frank quarter was the commercial and cultural center of the city and the residence of European and non-European economic elites. The Quay (modern-day ­Kordon) was the center of Levantine socio-cultural activities with cafes, social clubs, saloons, theaters, hotels, and consulates. European travelers often called it “little Paris of the ­Orient” after its urban make-up, cosmopolitan population, and liberal and vigorous social life (Kırlı, 2007; Pınar, 2001). 246

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The first public film screenings in Smyrna took place at the Club Apollon (a gymnastics and music club established in 1892) in the Frank quarter in 1896, around the same time that cinema was introduced to Constantinople and just a year later than the Lumière Brothers’ famous Grand Café exhibition in Paris. According to an Ottoman local newspaper, every night from 5 to 6 p.m. the Apollon hosted “very entertaining and worth-watching presentations” consisting of “pictures of moving objects” taken with Edison’s Kinematograph with “amazing mastery” (Beyru, 2000: 257). The word “cinema” was as yet absent from the discourse. Instead, “kinematograph” was used to refer to the exhibition technology. Later, the first movie theaters would also be called “kinematograf hane” or “sinematograf hane” (cinematograph places). A week later, a reporter from the same newspaper strongly advised readers to visit the club to see these “presentations” in order to witness current scientific progress. The screening included six Lumière shorts shown one after the other, and was watched by audiences with rapt attention and amazement. The reporter’s account of the viewing experience on that night suggests that they were engaged not simply by the movement per se but also by the rapidity of the change in locations, people, and actions across the films; apparently, it was the feeling of being quickly transported to different places and situations that most impressed the audience (Beyru, 2000: 257–258). The reporter’s account supports Hugo Münsterberg’s 1915 remark that the power of the “photoplay” lay not simply in its capacity of representing movement or reproducing reality but in its ability to liberate the body and the mind from space. Rapidity in the change of scenes and allowing the eye (and mind) to move from place to place, according to Münsterberg, enabled cinema to overcome the limitations of space (in Corrigan, White, and Mazaj, 2011: 11–13). Cinema in Smyrna remained itinerant until 1908 when the first movie theaters opened in the Quay area, in the same year that the first movie theater, Pathé, opened in Istanbul. Describing the rapid spread of movie theaters over the city as a “scary flood of the cinematograph,” a 1908 news report noted that there were four movie theaters in a “twenty-­meter area between the Kraemer Pub and the Sporting Club” on the Quay (“İzmir Haberleri,” 1908). The construction of two more in other districts was under consideration. Table 19.1 Table 19.1  Early movie theaters in Smyrna (1908–1913) Year

Name

Locale

Ownership

1908 1908

Cine Pallas Café de Paris/Ciné de Paris Parision Pathé Pantheon Astir Théâtre de Smyrne/ Smyrna Theatre Osmanlı Sinematograf hanesi Finix Melis National Library Cinema and Theatre

Quay/Kordon Quay/Kordon

Greek Greek

Quay/Kordon Quay/Kordon Quay/Kordon Evangelistria St. (Armenian Quarter) Quay/Kordon

Greek Italian Greek Greek American

Irgat Pazarı ( Jewish Quarter)

Jewish (later Italian)

St. Catherine St. (Greek Quarter) Evangelistria St. (Armenian Quarter) Beyler St./Konak

Greek Greek Turkish

1908 1909 1909 1910 1911 1911 1912 1913 1913

247

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lists the early movie theaters in Smyrna until the Great War (Berber, 1998; ­Chatziconstantinou, 2011; Makal, 1999; Nemutlu, 2011). Cinema announcements in local newspapers show that by 1914, movie theaters had spread to other districts such as Cordelio (Karşıyaka), Kokaryalı (Güzelyalı), Bournabat (Bornova), and Basmane. According to a trade guide, in 1914 there were fifteen cinemas (“sinematografhane”) in Smyrna, more than half of them being on the Quay. The first movie theaters were all owned by non-Muslims; most prominently by Greeks (Kırlı, 2005; Pınar, 2001). Only one of them, the National Library Cinema and Theatre, was owned by a Muslim Turk (­R ıfat, 1997: 21). Greeks owned both big and small cinemas, whereas Turks or Jews owned only the small ones. The Smyrna Theatre was owned by Americans, and the American Christian charity organization Y.M.C.A. also ran a cinema (Snell and Forsythe, 2014: 110). By 1920, the seventeen operating cinemas in Smyrna were reported as being the second most popular commercial recreational institutions in the city after coffee houses. Movie theaters typically had an interior arrangement consisting of a floor and a balcony, with seating capacities that varied from 400 to 600 (Bali, 2014: 111; Nemutlu, 2011: 124). The Smyrna Theatre was an exception in that in addition to 500 seats it had 42 lodges, with the same architectural plan as the Paris Théâtre du Châtelet in France (Zerouali, 2008: 166). Since it was originally a theater, like some other ones, the Smyrna Theatre had the typical theater arrangement including a stage (Snell and Forsythe, 2014: 110). Its most distinctive architectural feature was, however, its moving glass ceiling, which could be opened and closed and allowed it to be used as both a winter and summer theater (Nemutlu, 2011: 126). The Pathé was unique in its organization of its interior space, as well as the film viewing and other pleasures it entailed. In his memoirs, a Turkish Smyrniot recounts that in the middle of the cinema was an ice-skating rink. Thus the audience was able to watch simultaneously both the film on the screen and people skating on the ice (Ege, 2002: 20). Movie theater buildings appear to have had poor safety and sanitary conditions. The 1920 report recorded that none of them had emergency exits and only two had fire-extinguishing equipment. The only official measure taken to prevent accident in case of fire was a law that prohibited cinemas from admitting standing audiences (Snell and Forsythe, 2014: 111–112). Ventilation and heating were not adequate either, with only one theater reported as having an adequate heating plant. Others had single stoves, and these were apparently rarely used, in order to reduce the theaters’ running costs (Snell and Forsythe, 2014: 112).

Programming and audiences Most cinemas began their first performance at 5.30 p.m. and closed no later than 10 p.m., running two or three performances in-between. A typical program consisted of a drama as the lead film, followed by a comedy and often a short feature. Matinees were not common, but, sometimes special performances on Sunday or holiday afternoons took place. Occasionally cinemas also hosted theatrical plays and concerts. Since films were not abundant, cinemas showed the same films in turn by exchanging them among themselves, so that each cinema was able to change its program once a week. All performances were accompanied by a piano (Snell and Forsythe, 2014: 113–114). The films exhibited in movie theaters were all imported from Europe. Initially these were Pathé and Gaumont films, but after the end of the First World War and particularly from 1920 onwards, the films of Éclair, Nordix, Gloria, Ambrosio, Torino, Milano and Italia reached Smyrna’s the screens (Georgelin, 2008: 170). In the early 1920s, the majority of the films exhibited were Italian, followed by French and American films. Noting that Italian films were low in quality and included many acts 248

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of crime and immorality, the teachers of International American College welcomed the attempts to raise the quality of films by introducing French, English, and American films in place of the Italian ones (Snell and Forsythe, 2014: 113–114). Movie theaters attempted to attract audiences through brilliantly lighted facades and common promotional techniques such as colored billboards and pictures from the lead film displayed outside the buildings (Snell and Forsythe, 2014: 110). Audiences filled movie theaters especially on Sundays and holidays. While there are no formal statistics on audience ­composition, some site observations suggested that children (45 percent) and youths (40 percent) ­constituted the majority of the audience. Seventy percent were men and boys (Snell and Forsythe, 2014: 111). The 30 percent of women in the audience were presumably mostly non-Muslim, because Muslim women were not allowed to watch films together with men from the early 1910s until the establishment of the Turkish Republic. In 1912, an Ottoman newspaper reported that the people of İkiçeşmelik, a district populated by Muslim Turks, had asked the local governor to ban Muslim women’s attendance at movie theaters. The governor must have complied with the demand because the newspaper also reported that a letter signed by more than 600 people from the district had been sent to the governor, thanking him for taking action (Beyru, 2000: 258; Makal, 1999: 52; Neumann and Tamdoğan, 2008: 69). ­Muslim women were not, however, totally deprived of cinema, as cinema announcements in the newspapers show that most cinemas reserved special days and hours exclusively for women. There is a legendary story about the first admission of Muslim women to a cinema together with men. Cemil Filmer, the Turkish owner of the Ankara Cinema in İkiçeşmelik, recounts in his memoir that in 1923, Atatürk, the founder of modern Turkey, came to his cinema during an official trip to Smyrna. As the screening was about to start, Filmer ­reports that Atatürk noticed the absence of women among the audience and asked why. He was told that cinema was generally forbidden to women and that they were only admitted to ­Tuesday matinees. Dissatisfied with the answer, Atatürk ordered his assistant to bring in all the women outside, and “for the first time in Turkish history Muslim men and women watched a film in a cinema altogether” (Makal, 1999: 163). No information is available about the ethnic composition of audiences. Each ethnic community in Smyrna had their own churches, schools, hospitals, and charities, as well as social clubs, theaters, music halls, and coffee shops. A European traveler who visited the city in the early nineteenth century noted that the Greeks had had to establish their own music halls because they were looked down on by the British and other European merchants and denied entry to the Frank music halls (Beyru, 2000: 130; Bulut, 2010: 94). Social clubs, which had a significant function in Levantine social life, were exclusive places based on membership and not everybody was allowed to become a member (Georgelin, 2008: 149–150). As yet, there has not been enough research to establish whether cinemagoing, like music hall membership, played a significant role in ethnic or community identity formation and social distinction in Smyrna. An anecdote in the memoirs of Turkish Smyrniot Nail Moralı suggests that cinemas were cosmopolitan places. Moralı describes the Café de Paris as the cinema with the best films and mentions a Muslim figure called Tilki (Fox) Hafız (one who has memorized the Koran), whose occupation was to pray at religious and traditional ceremonies and who was admitted free of charge to cinemas, where he would take off his sarık (turban – Islamic headgear) and cübbe (an Islamic outfit) (Moralı, 2002: 52). Movie theaters’ being not exclusive to particular ethnic groups is also confirmed by the fact that they were the main locale for the demonstration of ethnic resentment, especially at times of conflict. Such demonstrations, an example of which is discussed below, suggest that movie theaters were not always peaceful places either. 249

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The problem of language and nationalist resentment In the eve of the First World War, the absence of Turkish from intertitles made Quay cinemas the target of resentment and protest among nationalist Turks. Initially, films had been shown with Greek intertitles. In 1913, in order to speed up the exhibition process and reduce exhibition costs, Greek intertitles were replaced with French ones (Georgelin, 2008: 171), so that for Turks, going to the cinema in Smyrna in the 1910s meant consuming European films with intertitles mostly in French (and sometimes in Italian or in English). In 1913, the young Turks of the nationalist association the Turkish Hearth (Türk Ocağı), asked the owners of the Quay cinemas to include intertitles in Ottoman Turkish. Receiving a negative response, the young Turks decided to protest the screenings in their own way: every night forty to fifty people from the association would go to different cinemas on the Quay, sit separately, and start to whistle and make noise as soon as the film started. Sami Bey, who attended one of these protests at the Café de Paris, describes how the sudden noise scared the audience, especially the women (Güneş, 2003: 106–107). The owners at first successfully attempted to placate the protesters by printing and distributing film flyers in Ottoman Turkish, but a few months later, the demonstrations resumed, increasing to the point that they prompted the owners to close down cinemas temporarily to prevent harm to people or property (Georgelin, 2008: 172). On one occasion, the French consul went to a cinema where Turkish students had gathered to protest. He asked the local police to expel the students, threatening to bring soldiers from the French battleship in the harbor. The students left to prevent tensions escalating (Özuyar, 2007: 91–94). Other sources indicate that the chaos ended when first the French and later the Austro-Hungarian consuls intervened and threatened the local governor (Georgeline, 2008: 173), but an article in an Ottoman local newspaper in 1914 suggests that the protests were not totally ineffective, noting that the manager of the Symrna Theatre, Mr. Polinsky, had introduced proper Turkish intertitles (Nemutlu, 2011: 126). Within the multi-ethnic atmosphere of Smyrna, movie theaters continued to be a battleground for nationalist causes throughout the Great War and during its aftermath. A local newspaper reported that in 1918, Greeks attacked the Italian-owned Pathé while demonstrating against the Turks and the Italians. Reportedly, following the 1918 armistice, a B ­ ritish battleship anchored at Smyrna harbor. Greeks gathered for a spectacular welcoming. The gathering soon turned into more Greek demonstrations at various places in the city. After hoisting the Greek flag in front of St. Photini Church and delivering some fervent speeches against the Turks, Greeks moved to Pathé to do the same thing there, since Italians were perceived as “the second major enemy after Turks.” When the Italian owner, namely Garoni, objected, Greeks broke Pathé’s windows (Makal, 1999: 84). These events provide more insight into the historical and political contexts in which Quay cinemas operated. They show that beyond being major film exhibition venues, cinemas were also sites of political tensions resulting from clashes between contesting ethnic interests.

Discussion As the major public entertainment venues, Quay cinemas occupied an important place within the vivid social and cultural atmosphere of cosmopolitan Smyrna. This atmosphere, however, came to an end with the infamous and still-controversial Great Fire of Smyrna in 1922 (Kırlı, 2005). The fire completely destroyed the Greek and Armenian quarters and much of the Frank quarter, including a part of the Quay. The Smyrna Theatre, Café de Paris, and Pathé were all lost in the fire. Cine Pallas and the Parision, which were next 250

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to each other, survived because the fire did not completely reach them. Although they survived the fire physically, both cinemas perished symbolically shortly thereafter, in that they became “Turkified” (via change in ownership and name) during the Turkish reconstruction and administration of the city. The Parision became the Sakarya Cinema (after the Battle of Sakarya in the Turkish War of Independence) and operated until 1943, when it was demolished and later replaced with an apartment building (Ballice, 2006: 367; Ürük, 2011a: 61). Cine Pallas, which was a 700-seat cinema that served Smyrniots with “the most precious art-house and adventure films” (Yetkin, 2002: 72, 133), lasted a few years longer. In July 1923, two months before the proclamation of the Turkish Republic, Cine Pallas hosted a Turkish troupe from Istanbul to perform a play in the presence of Atatürk. Vasfi Rıza Zobu, one of the performers, explained that they had to perform at Cine Pallas because there was no other place left: “all the other theatre and cinema buildings, including the grand theatre [the Smyrna Theatre] at the Quay, were all burned” (Zobu, 2003: 82). Bedia Muvahhit, who acted a major role in the play and became the first Muslim-Turkish actress to perform on stage (Sevinçli, 2002), added that even Cine Pallas was “ruined and devastated” and that the ground was still covered in ash left from the fire (Süsoy, 1987: 4). Cine Pallas switched ownership and became Tayyare (Aeroplane) Cinema, after the name of the Turkish institution (Tayyare Cemiyeti / Izmir Aeroplane Society) that bought it in 1926 (Makal, 1999: 198–199; Ürük, 2008: 236). Following a major modernist renovation in the 1930s, the building continued to serve as a cinema until the late 1960s, when it was bought and razed by a wealthy businessman to be replaced with an apartment block, also called Tayyare (Ürük, 2011b: 80). Today, on one of the outer walls of the building, there is a marble plaque which briefly refers to the theatrical performance at Cine Pallas mentioned above and commemorates Bedia Muvahhit as the first Muslim-Turkish actress to appear on stage. The only trace left from the Cine Pallas of the pre-Turkish, pre-fire Smyrna is its name on that marble plate, discursively imprisoned in a narrative of Turkish national and cultural progress. Certainly the 1922 Great Fire and the Turkish recapture and reconstruction of the city with a nationalist agenda marked a rupture in the urban history and memory of Izmir, including the history of cinema exhibition. In this chapter, I have attempted to reconstruct the lost memory of the early movie theaters of the Quay of Smyrna and the cinema exhibition scene in the then cosmopolitan city; all belonging to a faded past which has been ideologically framed in Turkish official discourse and in popular social imaginary as a past “unworthy” of remembering. The information that I have gathered from various sources is limited by its being mostly descriptive. The most interesting information comes from personal testimonies and memories, but these are few in number. Although this chapter is unable to provide a thick description, it points to the existence of a vivid cinema exhibition and cinemagoing culture in Izmir in the early twentieth century. In doing so, it calls for a reconsideration of the central position attributed to Istanbul in the histories of early cinema in Turkey. That would also encourage widening the horizon of early cinema studies in the country beyond Istanbul, which has hitherto been its spatial focus (Çeliktemel-Thomen, 2013: 25). My findings also suggest that for a fuller history of movie exhibition and moviegoing in Smyrna to be written, archival scrutiny should extend beyond Turkey. The Greek dominance in the city, including the cinema exhibition scene, calls for fruitful collaboration between scholars in both countries. Overall, it is hoped that this chapter will inspire more research into early cinema exhibition and moviegoing in Turkey and take its part among the efforts to expand the scope of international new cinema history research beyond the contexts of North America, Australia, and Europe. 251

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First movie theaters and early cinema Mutlu, D. K. (2007b) “The Russian Monument at Ayastefanos (San Stefano): Between Defeat and Revenge, Remembering and Forgetting.” Middle Eastern Studies 43(1): 75–86. Nemutlu, Ö. (2011) II. Meşrutiyet’ten Cumhuriyete İzmir’de Tiyatro. Izmir: Izmir Büyükşehir Belediyesi. Neumann, C. and Tamdoğan, I. (2008) “Bilinmeyen bir cemaatin portresi: Müslümanlar. Fikret ­Yılmaz’la söyleşi.” In M. Smyrnelis (ed.) İzmir 1830–1930 Unutulmuş Bir Kent mi? Bir Osmanlı Limanından Hatıralar. Istanbul: İletişim (pp. 61–71). Özel, O. (2012) “Arşivler meselemiz: Siyaset kurumunun tarihçiyle tehlikeli dansı ve meşruiyet kaybı.” Toplumsal Tarih 212: 24–33. Özen, M. (2008) “Travelling Cinema in Istanbul.” In M. Loiperdinger (ed.) Travelling Cinema in ­Europe: Sources and Perspectives. Frankfurt am Main and Basel: KINtop Schriften (pp. 47–53). Özen, S. (2010) “Rethinking the Young Turk Revolution: Manaki Brothers’ Still and Moving Images.” M.A. Thesis. Istanbul: Boğaziçi University. Özen, S. (2012) “Balkanların ilk sinemacıları mı? Manaki Biraderler.” Toplumsal Tarih 219, 60–67. Özön, N. (1962) Türk Sineması Tarihi Dünden Bugüne (1896–1960). Istanbul: Artist Reklam Ortaklığı Yayınları. Özön, N. (1968) Türk Sineması Kronolojisi 1895–1966. Ankara: Bilgi Yayınevi. Öztürk, S. (2011) “Söylemsel inşalardan üretilen sansür ve denetim efsanesi (1896–1923).” In D. Bayrakdar (ed.) Türk Film Araştırmalarında Yeni Yönelimler 8. Istanbul: Bağlam (pp. 43–56). Öztürk, S. (2013) “Türkiye’de sinema mekanlarını sözlü tarih üzerinden anlamak.” Milli Folklor 98: 19–31. Özuyar, A. (2004) Babıali’de Sinema. Istanbul: İzdüşüm Yayınları. Özuyar, A. (2007) Devlet-i Aliyye’de Sinema. Ankara: De Ki Basım Yayım Ltd. Şti. Pınar, İ. (ed.) (2001) Hacılar, Seyyahlar, Misyonerler ve İzmir: Yabancıların Gözüyle Osmanlı Döneminde İzmir 1608–1918. Izmir: İzmir Büyükşehir Belediyesi Kültür Yayını. Rıfat, H. (1997) İzmir 1914: Aydın Vilayeti 1330 Sene-i Maliyesi Ticaret Rehberi. (transcribed from ­Ottoman Turkish to Turkish script by E. Serçe) Izmir: Akademi Kitabevi. Sevinçli, E. (2002) İzmir’de Tiyatro. Izmir: İzmir Büyükşehir Belediyesi. Şeyben, Ö. (2006) “Türkiye’de ilk kez Manaki kardeşlerin çektiği filmler ve fotoğraflar.” Sinematürk 2, 22–29. Snell, S. and Forsythe, M. (2014) “Recreation.” In R. N. Bali (ed.) A Survey of Some Social Conditions in Smyrna, Asia Minor – May 1921. Istanbul: Libra (pp. 97–131). Süsoy, Y. (1987) “Bedia Muvahhit ve Vasfi Rıza Zobu’yla tatil sohbeti.” Milliyet 15 March, 4. Tilgen, N. (1951) “Türk filmciliğinin tarihçesi.” Film ve Öğretim 8–9: 10–11. Tilgen, N. (1953) “Türk filmciliği dünden bugüne 1914–1953.” Yıldız 30: 16–17. Tilgen, N. (1956) “Bugüne kadar filmciliğimiz.” Yeni Yıldız 36: 12–13. Ürük, Y. (2008) İzmir’i İzmir Yapan Adlar. Izmir: İzmir Büyük Şehir Belediyesi Kent Kitaplığı. Ürük, Y. (2011a) “Sinema cenneti İzmir 6.” İzmirlife 123: 60–62. Ürük, Y. (2011b) “Sinema cenneti İzmir 7.” İzmirlife 124: 78–80. Yetkin, S. (ed.) (2002) Ticari ve İktisadi İzmir Rehberi 1926. Izmir: İzmir Büyükşehir Belediyesi Kültür Yayını. Zerouali, B. (2008) “Sanat ve eğlence kavşağı.” In M. Smyrnelis (ed.) İzmir 1830–1930 Unutulmuş Bir Kent mi? Bir Osmanlı Limanından Hatıralar. Istanbul: İletişim (pp. 161–81). Zobu, V. R. (2003) “İzmir’deyiz.” İzmir Kent Kültürü Dergisi 6: 82–89.

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20 EXHIBITING FILMS IN A PREDOMINANTLY MEXICAN AMERICAN MARKET The case of Laredo, Texas, a small USA–Mexico border town, 1896–1960 José Carlos Lozano With a predominantly Spanish-speaking or bilingual Mexican American population that has always been the overwhelming majority in the town, Laredo, Texas, offers a distinctive case study in the history of cinema exhibition in the United States. Founded in 1755 by Spanish settlers, the town was first part of the Spanish colony of New Spain (1755–1820), then of Mexico (1821–1848), and finally of Texas and the United States after the triumph of the latter over Mexico in 1848 in the so-called “Mexican War.” A small town of around 3,000 people (almost all of them from Mexican descent) in the 1870s, Laredo, started to grow rapidly and attract high numbers of immigrants from the North during the 1880s, when the railroads arrived in town from both Corpus Christi and San Antonio, connecting to the Mexican railroad reaching Nuevo Laredo (the Mexican counterpart of Laredo, just across the Rio Grande). The geographical position of Laredo (on the most direct route between Mexico City and the East and Midwest of the USA) immediately made it the best choice for the importation and exportation of goods between the two countries. Attracted by the booming business, hundreds of German, Jewish, Irish, Italian, and ­A nglo-American immigrants came to town, acquiring ranches and agricultural land or opening ­ on-Hispanic commercial businesses: hardware stores, pharmacies, and banks. By 1930, these n immigrants represented almost 30 percent of the Laredo population, a ­sizeable number in ­comparison with the previous history of Laredo but still short of a demographic majority (Arreola, 2002: 157). By 1950, however, Mexican Americans represented 86 ­percent of the population, and they would continue to grow as a proportion, reaching more than 90 percent of the population from the 1990s on. To study the exhibition of films in small cities like this one, located far from major metropolitan areas and with a majority of the population who did not speak English well or at all, adds a useful case study to the growing research on different patterns and developments in the social history of film distribution, exhibition, and programming. As Robert C. Allen (2008) argues, many studies of cinema exhibition and moviegoing have painted a partial and very limited picture of the history of the exhibition of films and of their audiences due to their narrow focus on the metropolitan areas of the USA or Europe. Coupled with its geographical 254

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location, the history of the distribution and exhibition of films in this small city located on the United States–Mexico border provides a useful addition to the literature discussing the coexistence of Hollywood films with non-American films in specific localities. As a geographical area close to Mexico and distant from the main American Texan cities, Laredo provides revealing evidence about the flexibility and adaptability of cinema exhibition and programming in different regions of the USA in response to their cultural specificities. As Joseph Garncarz (1994), Clara Pafort-Overduin (2011), Peter Krämer (2011), and others have shown, national films in countries outside of the United States have been important alternatives to H ­ ollywood in the history of cinema, providing relevant choices to local audiences in countries with different cultural and linguistic circumstances. While the towns located on the border with Mexico formally belong to the United States, their geographical proximity to Mexico and the ethnicity, language, and culture of most of their inhabitants provide fertile ground to explore the ways in which film exhibitors responded to local conditions and to the cultural and linguistic peculiarities of their target publics. In this chapter, I will discuss the historical exhibition of films in this border town, from the proliferation of small theaters owned by local entrepreneurs in the first two decades to the unrelenting monopolization of exhibition and programming by a big regional chain partly owned by a major Hollywood national distributor. All data discussed in this chapter comes from the Screen Culture in Laredo, Texas project, a replica of the Enlightened City Project undertaken in Flanders, ­Belgium, by Daniel Biltereyst and Philippe Meers, and part of the Screen Culture in the ­Americas Project coordinated by the two Belgian scholars and the author.1 The Laredo p­ roject focuses on the history of film exhibition, programming, and cinemagoing experiences in this border town, applying a triangulation of methods based on a cartography of cinemas in Laredo; an extensive database of the exhibition of films in all Laredo theaters covering sample years from 1922 to 1972, and oral histories recording audiences’ memories of cinemagoing, in particular senior residents.

The first years (1896–1915) The oldest references to the use of cinema’s precursor technologies in Laredo date from August 1885, when a “grand musical concert and stereopticon views” was advertised in the local newspaper, promising “views and scenery from all parts of the world” (Laredo Times, 23 August 1885: 6). In 1888, when Laredo’s dramatically expanded population had reached around 11,000 inhabitants, the same newspaper invited the community to attend “magic lantern performances and music” in a local church with an admission price of 25 cents per person (Laredo Times, 29 December 1888: 7). In September 1899, the paper reported one of the first moving picture presentations in the city, along with the traditional program of singers and live entertainment, describing the event in terms that fit Tom Gunning’s (1990) characterization of early film as a cinema of attractions: It was indeed a revelation to many present who had never seen the wonderful spectacle of moving pictures to see for the first time a veritable circus procession moving along streets in which street cars, buses, backs and horses were all in motion as natural as life. (Laredo Times, 27 September 1899) The first venues exclusively dedicated to motion pictures in the city, the Solorzano, E ­ lectric, and Dreamland Theaters and the Electric Palace, opened in the late 1900s and early 1910s (Laredo Times, 7 June 1908: 12, 9 May 1909: 6). These and many other equally short-lived theaters were all located in the historical downtown area and owned locally either by 255

José Carlos Lozano Table 20.1  L aredo, Texas cinemas by year and operators (1907–1960) Name of cinema

Years

Location

Owner/lease holder

Solorzano Electric Palace

1907–1911 1909–1911

Downtown Downtown

Dreamland Electric Theater Royal

1909–1914 1909–1913 1911–1976

Downtown Downtown Downtown

Dixie, former Electric Palace Rex Airdome Star (formerly Electric Theater) Luna Park open air Strand

1912–1916

Downtown

Leopoldo Valdez Allan Stowers/Fierros & P.L. Broughbam Gutiérrez & García Alarcon Brothers Leopoldo Valdez (1911–1928)/ Robb & Rowley Theaters Mrs. M.A. Eitt

1915 1913

Downtown Downtown

Mrs. M.A. Eitt Deavours & Hughes

1915–1933

Downtown Downtown

Rialto

1920–1962

Downtown

Tivoli (formerly Strand) Azteca

1933–1969 1933–1957

Mexico

1935–1954

Plaza El Rancho Drive-In

1946–1982 1949–1955

Fiesta Drive In Bordertown Drive-In

1955–1972

Downtown Working-class neighborhood Working-class neighborhood Downtown Corpus Christi Highway Freer Highway San Antonio Highway

Unidentified William Epstein (1915–1924)/ Robb & Rowley Theaters Harry Weddington & H.A. Daniels (1920–1923)/ W. Epstein (1923–1924)/ Robb & Rowley Theaters Robb & Rowley Theaters Bob Bauer (1933–1937)/ Robb & Rowley Theaters Bob Bauer (1935–1937)/ Robb & Rowley Theaters Robb & Rowley Theaters Robb & Rowley Theaters Robb & Rowley Theaters Robb & Rowley Theaters

­ exican American or Anglo-American entrepreneurs (see Table 20.1). No group domiM nated. Leopoldo Valdez and his brother owned first the Solorzano Theater (1905–1910), and later the Royal (1911–1923). The Alarcon brothers owned the Electric Theater (1909–1911), while the Electric Palace (1910–1911), later The Dixie (1912–1915) was owned by M.A. Eitt. Most of them scheduled live Spanish-language entertainment, either with companies from ­Mexico City passing by in their way to major US cities or with local troupes.

Regional chains arrive in town (1915–1928) In 1915, the first nonlocal theater circuit, The Royal Amusement Co., constructed the Strand in front of the City Hall and Market. The company, which owned several theaters in Houston and San Antonio, sent E. D. Brewer to Laredo to manage the new cinema. This started a fierce competition with Valdez’ Royal and Eitt’s Rex Airdome (Laredo Weekly Times, 21 February and 7 November 1915), which continued until 1920, when a new theater, 256

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the Rialto, owned by H. A. Daniels and Air Force Lieutenant Harry Weddington (assigned to Kelly’s Air Force base in San Antonio), opened. In 1923, the San Antonio-based Royal Amusement Company negotiated with Valdez the lease of the Royal and bought the Rialto from Weddington and Daniels, making it the sole operator of cinemas in the city. William Epstein, a Jewish Russian immigrant and president of the company, had come to Laredo two years earlier to take care of the Strand and perhaps to prepare the acquisition of the other two venues. He renovated the Royal and dedicated it only to motion pictures (as opposed to its former dual role of opera house and theater) while devoting the Strand to western movies and some Mexican and American vaudeville (Laredo Weekly Times, 5 August 1923: 10). In June 1924, Epstein sold the operation of the three Laredo theaters to a bigger and more powerful out-of-town circuit: the Robb & Rowley (R&R) company of Dallas, Texas, which by then owned or operated 23 theaters in Texas (San Antonio Express, 1 June 1924: 21). From this time onwards, this Anglo-American circuit would partially or totally control cinema exhibition in Laredo, despite the demographic majority of Spanish-speakers in the population and the fact that Hispanic entrepreneurs were at the time controlling and consolidating small local or regional chains in the rest of the border and in the state as a whole. H. F. Valdez, the only Mexican American businessman still involved in film exhibition in Laredo during the 1920s, regained control of the Royal after its destruction by a fire in 1926 (San Antonio Express, 7 August 1926: 4). Valdez rebuilt the theater and re-opened it some months later, starting an aggressive competition with the two R&R cinemas in town until he was unable to keep the Royal afloat against the superior and more popular films brought to Laredo by the Dallas circuit. In August 1928, Valdez signed a five-year contract with R&R, and all Laredo theaters returned to the control of that exhibition circuit (see ­Table  20.1), which by then was operating some fifty theaters in sixteen Texan cities and another sixteen venues in the neighboring state of Oklahoma (Laredo Weekly Times, 1 August 1928). By contrast to the situation in Laredo, other Texan border cities with lower percentages of Hispanics such as El Paso, McAllen, and Brownsville had a substantial number of cinema venues owned and/or operated by entrepreneurs from Mexico or of Mexican descent. In El Paso, the Calderon brothers operated five theaters as early as 1919, and in 1932 they established Azteca Films, the main distribution company for Mexican films in the United States. Azteca would thrive during the following forty years because of the demand for ­Spanish-language motion pictures in cities like Chicago, Los Angeles, San ­A ntonio, and others with a high concentration of Mexican immigrants and Mexican Americans (­Agrasánchez, 2006: 161). By the late 1930s, Hispanic exhibitors owned or operated very successful cinema venues serving the Mexican American population on the part of the Texas border with Mexico called the Valley (McAllen, Edinburg, Pharr, Harlingen, Weslaco). Miguel Benitez, for example, operated three theaters in Weslaco by 1939. Some twenty years later he and his family owned twelve outlets showcasing Mexican pictures in the area (­Agrasánchez, 2006: 142). The Ruenes family, immigrants arriving in the state from Spain in 1902, operated several theaters from the 1920s to the 1960s in San Benito, Harlingen, Brownsville, and Port I­ sabel (pp. 146–147). From 1931, the brothers Juan and Paul Garza operated the San Antonio theaters Progreso and Obrero, competing with the other Spanish-Language film venues Nacional and Zaragoza, which were owned by the Italian Gaetano Lucchese since the 1920s (pp. 108–109). Unlike these towns, cinema exhibition in Laredo, the city with the highest p­ ercentage of Mexican Americans in the state, remained tightly under the control of mainstream ­A merican entrepreneurs or US regional or national circuits during most of the 1920s and from 1928 onwards, largely as a result of well thought out and consistent strategies to exploit this market. 257

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Demand for Spanish-language films grows (1928–1938) During the silent era, responding to the huge local demand, Laredo theaters had regularly included Spanish-language live entertainment in their programs, either with the participation of local troupes or with Mexican companies on their way to San Antonio or other major Texan cities. Along with the Spanish-language zarzuelas, operas, vaudeville, and theater plays, these theaters would also include American short films in the program. The original small Mexican American population had grown substantially, with huge waves of Mexican immigrants fleeing first the harsh conditions of the Porfirio Diaz dictatorship and later the Mexican revolution (1909–1920). By 1920, Laredo’s population had reached 22,000, many of them recent migrants from the neighboring North-eastern Mexican states of ­Tamaulipas, Nuevo Leon, and Coahuila, making the Hispanic population in the city more than 70 ­percent of its total (Arreola, 2002). Some of the newcomers were political refugees from the Mexican revolution (well educated and with good economic resources), but many more were poor Mexican immigrants arriving to town to work as laborers on the railroads or the thriving local farms. Most of these Mexicans only spoke Spanish, representing a most important segment of the market for the local theaters. Regardless of whether the owners of the v­ enues were Anglo, European, or of Mexican descent, they needed to offer ­Spanish-language ­entertainment to reach this vast audience. Mexican films occasionally substituted for American motion pictures during these first three decades of the twentieth century. In October 1920, for example, the Mexican movie El Automóvil Gris (The Gray Automobile, Azteca, 1919), based on a real-life gang of robbers who perpetrated crimes in Mexico City during 1915, was a huge success at the Strand. According to The Laredo Times, the public were stacked up on the sidewalk, in the lobby and the house was crammed to its full capacity with people … So great was the crowd that many did not see the picture, so Manager Epstein held the picture over for another showing tonight. (Laredo Weekly Times, 24 October 1920: 2) ­ mperador In 1924, the same theater would show for two consecutive days Maximiliano I, E de Mexico (Rolf Randolf-Film, 1920), advertised as “a picture made in Mexico and all ­sub-titles… in Spanish” despite its German origin. According to the theater advertising, more than 2,000 people saw it the first day, causing the management to schedule a second day of screenings (The Laredo Times, 7 June 1924: 6). As late as 1929, The Strand was still screening silent Mexican films, advertising them prominently in the local newspaper (Laredo Times, 22 July 1929: 3) with phrases like “One of the best pictures brought out of Mexico and being road-showed in this country” and “First time shown in the United States” for La Boda de Rosario (Compañía Nacional Productora de Películas, 1929). Talking films arrived to Laredo in the last months of 1928. The Royal had returned to the R&R group several months earlier, and the circuit decided to install both Vitaphone and  the  Movietone equipment in the Rialto. The first talking movie shown in the city was While the City Sleeps (MGM, 1928) on 4 November, the day of the presidential election, and the management decided to transmit the returns of the election through the new sound ­system between shows (Laredo Weekly Times, 6 July 1928, p. 1). With sound, Hollywood productions stopped being so attractive to the vast majority of Laredoans who only spoke Spanish. The need to offer movies in this language made the R&R group fully embrace Hollywood Spanishlanguage versions of regular US movies, scheduling dozens of them in the Strand during 258

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1930–1933. The Strand programmed silent movies until 30 May 1930 when it screened “the first Spanish-speaking feature”: Sombras de Gloria (Sono-Art), the Spanish-­ language version of Blaze o’ Glory (Sono-Art, 1929). In the next months, the venue would screen many other Spanish-language versions of Hollywood films, including ­Paramount’s “­primera película totalmente hablada en español, interpretada por artistas hispanos” (“first movie completely in Spanish, with Hispanic actors”) El Cuerpo del Delito (The Benson Murder Case, Paramount, 1930), Su íntimo secreto (Her Private Affair, Pathé, 1929), Así es la Vida (What a Man, Sono-Art, 1930), and El Precio de un Beso (One Mad Kiss, Fox, 1930), among many others (Laredo Weekly Times, 3 July, 4, 8, and 31 ­August, 2 November 1930). In the early 1930s, Laredo’s 32,000 inhabitants had only three movie houses: the Strand, the Royal, and the Rialto, all owned or managed by the R&R Circuit and all located in the historical downtown. The scheduling of Mexican movies three days a week in the Strand was apparently not enough to satisfy the local demand, because a new independent theater opened in 1933 to cater to the Laredo Mexican American audience. The Anglo-American businessman Robert Bauer, who had worked for Columbia Pictures in Los Angeles before moving to ­Laredo, remodeled an old vaudeville theater in a working-class neighborhood on the outskirts of the city. The Azteca Theater opened in May 1933, devoting three days a week to Hollywood Spanish-language versions or films produced in Mexico (Laredo Times, 3 May 1933). The new venue was so successful that in October 1935 Bauer opened a new theater, the Mexico. Designed, like the Azteca, to attract working-class Mexican Americans, the Mexico was located in a modest neighborhood on the west side of Laredo. Because of the popularity of both cinema houses, the R&R group, which had also continued to screen Spanish-language films in at least one of its first-run theaters, bought both theaters from Bauer in January 1938, regaining total control of exhibition in Laredo (see Table 20.1). Wishing to keep the patronage of the Spanish-speaking population, the entertainment group increased the screening of Mexican films in both theaters and the Royal, alternating them with English-language films from Hollywood, while the Rialto and the Tivoli (the ­revamped Strand) continued to focus exclusively on English-language movies (Laredo Times, issues from January to December 1938).

The Golden Age of Mexican cinema in Laredo (1938–1962) With the advent of sound, national film production in many parts of the world had a chance to compete with Hollywood, thanks to the language disadvantage of the latter. Among the countries taking most advantage of this situation was Mexico, as a result of the Mexican federal government’s policies in support of national culture, the return of Mexican directors, actors, producers, and technicians from Hollywood during the Great Depression, and ­Hollywood’s direct help to the Mexican film industry, particularly during the first years of the Second World War. From the late 1930s until the mid-1950s, Mexico’s film industry experienced a Golden Age, becoming one of the most important film industries in the world and the leading film producer among Spanish-speaking regions (Fein, 1994). Mexican film stars like Pedro Infante, Jorge Negrete, Maria Felix, Dolores del Rio, Mario Moreno (­Cantinflas), and many others became extremely popular not only in Mexico but all over Latin America and among Latino audiences in the United States. During this period, Mexican films were widely exhibited in the United States, particularly in cities heavily populated by Hispanics. According to Agrasánchez (2006: 8), there were 145 US theaters in 1941 screening Spanish-language movies, 300 in 1945 and 683 in 259

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1951. Laredo was no exception, and most Mexican productions of this era were exhibited by the R&R theaters in the first-run palace theaters patronized by both Anglo and Mexican American citizens, rather than in ethnic cinemas operating exclusively for Hispanic audiences, as happened elsewhere. In 1937, the R&R company sold 50 percent of its by then eighty film theaters chain to United Artists Theaters, Inc. (UAT), a company operating independently of the United Artists film producing and distributing corporation (El Heraldo de Brownsville, 17 June 1937: 12), although it retained the same circuit management, under the new name of R&R United, Inc. With this partnership the R&R group secured consistent and reliable access to new and popular films, and kept costs low by standardizing and centralizing even more the operation of its cinemas. The alliance with UAT, however, did not deter the local management in Laredo from ­looking for a reliable stream of Mexican films that would serve its large ­Spanish-language ­market. In the late 1930s and early 1940s it had contracts with Azteca Films and C ­ LASA-Mohme, the two distributors of Mexican films in the United States. In a news story published in 1942 in the Spanish-language section of the local newspaper, the manager of the R&R local circuit boasted: With the contract we just signed with Mr. Mohme on behalf of the Royal theater, in addition to the previous agreements we already had with other Mexican distributors, all films previously made in Mexico, and all the ones to be produced in the future, will be available for Laredo audiences. (Laredo Times, 18 Jan 1942: 44) During 1932, only around 6 percent of movies exhibited in all Laredo theaters were in ­Spanish. This rose to 20 percent in 1942 and reached a peak of 58 percent in 1952 (see ­Table 20.2), before decreasing to 31 percent in 1962.2 By 1972, it would decrease further to 26 percent, mostly due to the decline of Mexican films produced after the early 1960s (Rosas Mantecón, 2000; Tello, 1988). Table 20.2  N  umber of films and shows by language exhibited in Laredo, Texas theaters (1952) Films Theater

English

Shows Spanish

Total

English

Spanish

Total

Plaza

53

53

208

208

Tivoli

64

64

208

208

El Rancho Drive-In Royal Azteca

53 5

12 58 100

65 63 100

91 10 0

13 194 206

104 204 206

Mexico Total %

9 184 42

86 256 58

95 440 100

36 553 49

172 585 51

208 1138 100

Note. The number of films and shows corresponds to 52 days of 1952 (Fridays or Sundays) not the whole year, according to the movie listings published in the Laredo Times. The number of shows was estimated as four per day in each cinema (but only two in the El Rancho Drive-In) because the listings would not include the times for each screening, only the opening times (usually 1:00 p.m.). In days in which a theater would show two features instead of one, each film was credited with two shows instead of four.

260

Films in Mexican American market

Hollywood Spanish-language versions and Mexican movies were heavily advertised in the local newspaper from the 1930s until the 1960s, usually in the Spanish-language section of the daily but also in the regular English language page devoted to films, in an attempt to reach the significant portion of the Laredo population who did not speak English or who preferred Spanish. The 1940s saw a peak in Laredo’s cinema exhibition in general, in keeping with national patterns (Pautz, 2002). Our own database of films screened in Laredo from 1922 to 1962 reports a total of around 1,275 screenings (around four to five screenings per movie per day), in comparison with only 415 on the same days of 1932 and 1,138 in 1952. In 1946, the R&R circuit built a new cinema house, the Plaza, and dedicated it exclusively to the screening of Hollywood movies in English, with occasional offerings of Spanish-language movies. With the establishment of this new venue, R&R decided to change the Rialto’s policy of US films only to “first-run Mexican pictures five days a week” while the Royal continued to show Mexican films three days a week and American films the rest of the time (Laredo Times, 31 December 1946: 6). Responding to the persistent demand for Spanish-language films, the local R&R management kept the same system of pairing Hollywood and Mexican films in the drive-ins that the group opened in the city, first at El Rancho Drive-In in the late 1940s and later in the Tower, Fiesta, and Bordertown Drive-Ins during the 1950s and 1960s. The movie listings for 4 November 1950, in the Laredo Times, for example, show the abundant offerings of Spanish-language movies in the various theaters, usually playing in a double bill with a Hollywood production. Out of the six theaters operating in the city, the two grander and more modern (Plaza and Tivoli) were screening English-language films only: The Big Wheel (United Artists, 1949) in the Plaza and Motor Patrol (Lippert, 1950) and Bomba and the Lost Volcano (Monogram, 1950) in the Tivoli. The other four cinemas were showing a combination of Hollywood and Mexican pictures. The Royal was screening Los Viejos Somos Asi (Filmex, 1948) and Raiders of the Range (RKO, 1950); the Mexico Rio Escondido (Raúl de Anda, 1948) and La Viuda Celosa (Clasa-Mohme, 1946); the Azteca El Canto de la Sirena (CAFISA, 1948) and Chachita la de Triana (Producciones Rodríguez Hermanos, 1947), while El Rancho Drive-In was screening Reina de Reinas (Hispano Continental, 1948) and When the Daltons Rode (Universal, 1940). By 1949, the consolidation of theater circuits in the United States had dramatically increased. While in 1930, ten Texas chains operated 200 movie houses between them, with other smaller chains and independent owners operating the 132 remaining outlets, nineteen years later the four largest state chains (R&R included) controlled a total of 363 venues (Alicoate, 1949). R&R United, Inc. itself operated 95 theaters in Texas along with 29 more in Oklahoma and Arkansas (Table 20.3). Because UAT operated independently of United Artists, the Paramount ruling did not affect its partnership with R&R, although the ruling’s prohibition of block booking and other trade practices did apply to it. In fact, in 1955 UAT bought the remaining Class A stock from the Rowley family in exchange for UAT shares and became the sole proprietor (Abilene Reporter News, 2 September 1955). Ed Rowley, the surviving member of the two founders of the original R&R group, became a principal executive of the United Artist circuit in New York in the same year (Wichita Daily Times, 8 November 1955). His son John succeeded him as president of the exhibition circuit, which retained the name of Rowley United Theaters. From then onwards, the Rowleys were prominent corporate members of the national UAT, illustrating one of the ways that major regional chains were attracted to and merged with the national big chains. These changes did not alter the Laredo R&R theaters’ prevailing exhibition policies. In addition to Hollywood movies arriving in town via the parent company, the local 261

José Carlos Lozano Table 20.3  Robb & Rowley exhibition circuit in Texas, Oklahoma, and Arkansas by year and cities Year

Number Name of the of company theaters

Owners

Places

1909 1911

1 1

Harold Robb H. Rob & Ed. Rowley

1925

36

1930

61

Sweetwater, Texas Nickelodeon San Angelo, Texas Nickelodeon. Ed Rowley buys 50 percent interest of the company Texas cities San Antonio Light, 8 March 1925, p. 15 Oklahoma: 11 Alicoate 1930: p. 785 Texas: 50 in 16 cities

1931

40

1937

80

R&R United, Inc.

1946

113

1956

140

Rob & Rowley Theaters Rowley United Theaters, Inc.

1964

147

The Lyric Robb & Rowley theater R&R R&R Theater Enterprises, Inc. HughesFranklin Theaters

Rowley United Theaters, Inc.

H.B. Robb & Ed Rowley H.B. Robb & Ed Rowley

Howard Hughes

Notes/sources

16 cities in Texas and Oklahoma

R&R sells forty theaters in sixteen cities to the new chain for $3,500,000, but reacquires them in January, 1932. La Prensa de San Antonio, Texas, 14 February 1931, p. 4; Big Spring Herald, 8 January 1932 H.B. Robb & TX, Oklahoma, UAT becomes co-owner (50 Ed Rowley Arkansas percent) of the R&R circuit. Big Spring Daily Herald, 16 June 1937, p. 1 E.H Rowley & 35 towns in Laredo Times, 31 December C.V. Jones Texas, Oklahoma, 1946. Arkansas Rowley United (formerly Ed Rowley R&R) merges with United & son John Artists, Theaters, Inc. keeping Rowley and the name of the company and UAT stock in the merge, with John acting as president. Ed and his other son Edward move to UA offices in NY. Odessa American, 22 January 1956, p. 2 John Rowley Texas, Oklahoma, Corpus Christi Times, 13 May Arkansas 1964, p. 5C

venues kept their individual agreements with the Mexican distributors Azteca Film and Clasa-Mohme in order to keep servicing the vast majority of the Spanish-speaking population. All Laredo cinema venues remained in UAT’s hands during the 1960s–1990s, until the national chain was bought by the Regal Entertainment Group in 2002 (Yuma Sun, 4 March 2003: D4). Today, the Regal Group still manages one of the two main film theater complexes in the city (the other one is Cinemark), showing the long historical continuity of film exhibition in the city. 262

Films in Mexican American market

Exhibition strategies in a Mexican American town Looking at the more than fifty years that the R&R Circuit controlled exhibition in the significant Laredo Latino market, three principal strategies and policies can be detected. First, the local R&R management pursued an aggressive policy of scheduling live entertainment and films in Spanish in most of its theaters. Before sound, the venues would regularly book local and itinerant Spanish-language companies of vaudeville, zarzuela, and opera, and occasional Mexican or Spanish films when they were available. With the arrival of sound, the local exhibitors’ need to program Spanish-language pictures grew significantly. They screened most of the Spanish-language versions of Hollywood films in the early 1930s, and as soon as there was a steady supply of Mexican films available, they signed individual contracts with Azteca Films and Clasa-Mohme, ensuring that all Mexican productions were shown in Laredo. They also moved rapidly to eliminate all competition in the ­Spanish-language working-class market. In contrast to cities such as San Antonio, El Paso, and McAllen, where the American regional or national chains decided to concentrate on the English-language market and leave the Spanish-language niche to local minority entrepreneurs (Agrasánchez, 2006; Serna, 2006), the R&R Circuit had to make sure that the vast number of ­non-English-speaking Mexican Americans in the city would be regular patrons at its theaters. This motivated its aggressive acquisition of the two independent theaters showing Spanish-language movies in 1938, its consistent screening of Mexican films in both first-run and second- or third-run theaters, and its extensive use of Spanish-language advertisements in the Spanish-language section of the local newspaper for more than thirty years. The second way that the R&R circuit adapted its local venues to the overwhelming Latino population of Laredo was by not establishing or enforcing any type of s­egregation policy against Mexicans or Mexican Americans in any of its cinemas, despite this being a ­common practice in many other Texan (and US) cities at the time, including border cities such as El Paso (­ Montoya, 2001; Oppenheimer, 1985; Serna, 2006: 2014). While in theaters in Fort Worth, Dallas, Austin, and other Texas cities, it was common in the 1920s to find ­ exicans and signs that read “­ Mexicans not wanted” (Serna, 2014: 191), in Laredo, Texas, M Mexican ­A mericans were allowed to enter any cinema and occupy any seat. In c­ ontrast, ­A frican-Americans living in Laredo (most of them soldiers serving at the local Fort M ­ acintosh), were not permitted admission to any of Laredo’s cinemas.3 R&R’s strategy in Laredo was to always have one or two of its main theaters alternating Hollywood and Mexican (or Spanish-language) movies on different days of the week, making sure to have at least one of its best theaters devoted exclusively to English-language movies. These theaters (Rialto in the early 1930s, Tivoli in the early 1940s, Plaza from the late 1940s to the 1960s) would discriminate their audiences along class rather than ethnic lines, in part due to the higher cost of admission, in part because working-class Mexican Americans knew only Spanish and would not go and see English-language films, while middle-class and upper-class Mexican Americans tended to be bilingual.4 For the Mexican American working-class audience, R&R had not only the big palaces in downtown but also, from 1938 to the late 1950s, two neighborhood cinemas, the Azteca and the Mexico, both located in modest low-income sectors of the city. The third strategy followed by the R&R’s managers throughout the fifty years that the group controlled all of Laredo’s theaters was to involve themselves in the civic, social, and economic life of the city. Despite coming from Dallas or other parts of Texas, they quickly became active participants in local organizations (Chamber of Commerce, Rotary Club, Skeet Club), and committees (Washington Birthday Celebration, Gateway Jubilee, 263

José Carlos Lozano

Pan American Fair and Livestock), and they would make the theaters available for charity fund-raising, commencements, electoral centers, amateur-night shows, and raffles.5 This strategy of making themselves and their venues an integral part of the community was widespread at the time. In 1930, the Motion Picture Theater Owners of America (MPTOA) encouraged small-town managers to “engage in even more extensive civic involvement, including consulting with local ministerial organizations, women’s clubs, and school officials” (Waller, 2008: 179), in order to secure the good will of the community. The same tactic used by R&R in Laredo had been applied successfully in Placerville, California by exhibitor Travelle during the 1910s (Potamianos, 2008) and by many other small-town theater operators (Midkiff Debauche, 2008; Waller, 2008). What distinguished R&R’s strategy in Laredo was the fact that a large regional chain, owned by non-Latinos, willingly engaged and became part of the community in a city that was 70–90 percent Mexican American, opening its main first-run theaters to Spanish-language social, civic, and educational events and interacting socially, politically, and at a personal level with local Hispanic organizations, clubs, and personalities. Thanks to these three strategies, the group was able to thrive in the most Mexican of all Texan cities for fifty years, blocking the arrival and proliferation of competitors through alliances and mergers with national distribution companies and, more importantly, through steadily adapting its cinemas and their programming to the socio-cultural context in which it was operating.

Conclusion Case studies that offer contrasting cultural and social conditions because of their geographical location or peculiarities in demographic composition are extremely useful to identify processes that complement and refine the traditional narratives of the history of cinema exhibition and distribution. Specific studies of small cities and towns provide new information and distinct angles about the flexible and diverse ways in which cinema and cinemagoing spread and consolidated in different regions of a country and of the world. In his introduction to Douglas Gomery’s Shared Pleasures (1992: x), David Bordwell includes in his listing of new questions about “the concrete practices of film production, distribution, and consumption” the following: according to what principles of structure and conduct did film exhibition operate?; what strategies of financing, organization, technical innovation, and growth did it follow?; and what can the answers to such questions tell us about the look and sound of films, or about their functions in modern society? The answers to these questions vary according to the different sociocultural and geographical settings in which actual distributors and exhibitors operated. Because of its particular ethnic and linguistic conditions, Laredo provides a valuable case study for precisely tracing one of these relevant variations in the history of cinema exhibition and programming in the United States. On the one hand, the case of this United States–Mexico border town illustrates how mainstream national distribution and exhibition systems were able to function in a cultural and geographical context significantly different from the standard American market. On the other hand, it shows how this same distinctive context motivated a large exhibition circuit to modify its usual policies and “principles of conduct” in order to adapt its programming strategies to a local market characterized by strong Mexican cultural features and a predominance of the Spanish language. Furthermore, this study shows how the economies of scale that promoted mergers, acquisitions, and alliances in the film distribution and exhibition 264

Films in Mexican American market

industries at the national and regional levels during the first-half of the twentieth century affected the ownership and competition among theaters in Laredo without altering the need for flexible policies that could most effectively exploit this particular market. This chapter shows the relevance of case studies to provide complementary or alternative information about the history of film exhibition in the United States. The history of exhibition in ­Laredo illustrates the structural workings of the film industry as a whole at the same time that it demonstrates some specific characteristics and diversified practices. In the microcosm of a border town located far away from Los Angeles and New York geographically, culturally, and linguistically, we can clearly observe the strategies of Hollywood distributors and its regional allies to control the business. From a methodological perspective, this chapter also shows the potential of local and regional newspaper archives for the historical reconstruction of the exhibition of films outside major American cities. Unlike cities such as New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles, where many public and private historical records have been preserved and are readily available, small towns across the United States frequently lack robust and readily accessible sources for research. In contrast, historical full-text editions of regional newspapers available in databases like “Newspaper Archive” provide a wealth of information about the circuits, cinema venues, film exchanges, as well as corporate mergers, alliances, and investments throughout the decades. Local newspapers in the numerous cities where the Robb & Rowley Group owned or operated theaters would frequently publish stories about visits from owners or partners, the opening of cinema venues by the circuit, alliances with local theater operators, acquisitions and mergers, as well as many other events relevant to an economic and sociocultural history of distribution and exhibition of films in Texas and the country more generally. Of course, newspaper reports cannot provide all the information needed to track the complex processes of vertical integration, trade practices, and the maze of relationships between regional exhibition circuits and the distribution companies of Hollywood majors, but they offer valuable secondary data that can fill many gaps in an overview of the historical development of film exhibition in small towns. Many more empirical studies both in the United States and other countries are required to construct a more sophisticated account of the complexities and peculiarities of the historical distribution and exhibition of films in different contexts for different types of publics. The account presented here adds to this growing literature the case of an American city with very contrasting and peculiar characteristics, in which structural constraints imposed by national players in the distribution and exhibition sectors interacted dynamically with powerful ethnic, cultural and geographic forces that resulted in creative exhibition arrangements and the programming of hundreds of Mexican movies for the local Spanish-language population.

Notes 1 See www.cinemacitycultures.com. 2 In our database, we coded one day per week (52 days total) for each of the following years: 1922, 1932, 1942, 1952, and 1962. The database includes the title, number and date of screenings of each of the films exhibited as well as their origin, language, and genre, theater name, main actors, director, and production company. Depending on the availability of issues, the days selected for the movie listings published in the Laredo Times in the sampled years were either Fridays or Sundays. 3 On 21 April 1937, the Laredo Times reported that a petition signed by 74 “negro” residents of ­L aredo had been presented to the city council, requesting a section “with sixteen to twenty seats to accommodate negro patrons who would visit the movie shows.”

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José Carlos Lozano 4 Although the specific number of Spanish-only speakers in Laredo is not available for the decades 1920s–1960s, there are some indirect references suggesting the percentage was indeed very high. A story published in the Laredo Times on 3 April 1929, reported that “of the 4,067 students in Laredo elementary grades, only 217 are of homes in which English is principally spoken” (p. 2). 5 In 1930, Jack Rowley, father of one of the two main partners in the circuit and first manager of the Laredo R&R theaters (1925–1931), was described by a feature in the local newspaper in the following terms: Jack Rowley is always in every movement for the good of Laredo …. He also gives his personal time to every worthy cause and is counted as one of the leading citizens of this section. He is a member of Laredo Chamber of Commerce, the Rotary Club and a member of the Boy Scout Council. Jack Rowley has become part of this section and he has the interest of this city as his own. He loves the city and he came here to be one of the great number to do good while he can. (Laredo Times, 11 May 1930, p. 2)

References Agrasánchez, R. (2006) Mexican Movies in the United States. A History of Films, Theaters and Audiences, 1920–1960. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company. Alicoate, J. (1930) The 1930 Film Daily Yearbook of Motion Pictures. New York, NY: The Film Daily. Alicoate, J. (1949) The 1949 Film Daily Yearbook of Motion Pictures. New York, NY: The Film Daily. Allen, R. C. (2008) “Decentering Historical Audience Studies.” In K. Fuller-Seeley (ed.) Hollywood in the Neighborhood: Historical Case Studies of Local Moviegoing. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press (pp. 20–33). Arreola, D. (2002) Tejano South Texas: A Mexican American Cultural Province. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press. Fein, S. (1994) “Hollywood, U.S.-Mexican Relations, and the Devolution of the “Golden Age” of Mexican Cinema.” Film Historia 4: 103–135. Garncarz, J. (1994) “Hollywood in Germany. The role of American Films in Germany, 1925–1990.” In D. Ellwood and R. Kroes (eds.) Hollywood in Europe: Experiences of a Cultural Hegemony. ­A msterdam: VU University Press (pp. 94–135). Gomery, D. (1992) Shared Pleasures: A History of Movie Presentation in the United States. Madison, WI: The University of Wisconsin Press. Gunning, T. (1990) “The Cinema of Attractions: Early Film, its Spectator and the Avant Garde.” In T. Elsaesser and A. Barker (eds.) Early Cinema: Space, Frame, Narrative. London: British Film Institute Publishing (pp. 56–62). Krämer, P. (2011) “Hollywood and its Global Audiences.” In R. Maltby, D. Biltereyst, and Ph. Meers (eds.) Explorations in New Cinema History: Approaches and Case Studies. Malden, MA: Blackwell (pp. 171–184). Midkiff DeBauche, L. (2008) “At the Movies in the Biggest Little City in Wisconsin.” In K. F ­ uller-Seeley (ed.), Hollywood in the Neighborhood: Historical Case Studies of Local Moviegoing. ­Berkeley, CA: ­University of California Press (pp. 149–168). Montoya, M. E. (2001) “A brief History of Chicana/o school segregation: One Rationale for Affirmative Action.” Berkeley La Raza Law Journal 12(2): 159–172. Oppenheimer, R. (1985) “Acculturation or Assimilation: Mexican Immigrants in Kansas, 1900 to World War II.” Western Historical Quarterly 16(4): 429–448. Pafort-Overduin, C. (2011) “Distribution and Exhibition in The Netherlands, 1934–1936.” In R. Maltby, D. Biltereyst, and Ph. Meers (eds.) Explorations in New Cinema History: Approaches and Case Studies. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing (pp. 125–139). Pautz, M. C. (2002) “The Decline in Average Weekly Cinema Attendance, 1930–2000.” Political Science Faculty Publications Paper 25: University of Dayton eCommons. http://ecommons.udayton.edu/ cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1023&context=pol_fac_pub [Accessed 29 November 2018] Potamianos, G. (2008) “Building Movie Audiences in Placerville, California, 1908–1915.” In K. ­F uller-Seeley (ed.), Hollywood in the Neighborhood: Historical Case Studies of Local Moviegoing. ­B erkeley, CA: University of California Press (pp. 75–90).

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Films in Mexican American market Rosas Mantecón, A. (2000) “Auge, ocaso y renacimiento de la exhibición de cine en la ciudad de México (1930–2000).” Alteridades 10(20): 107–116. Serna, L. I. (2006) “We are Going Yankee”: American Movies, Mexican Nationalism, Transnational Cinema, 1917–1935. Ph.D. Dissertation, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University. Serna, L. I. (2014) Making Cinelandia. American Films and Mexican Film Culture before the Golden Age. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Tello, J. (1988) “Notas sobre la política económica del ‘viejo’ cine mexicano.” In Fundación Mexicana de Cineastas (Comp.), Hojas de Cine: testimonios y documentos del nuevo cine latinoamericano. http:// cinelatinoamericano.org/biblioteca/assets/docs/documento/561.pdf [Accessed 20 July 2017] Waller, G. (2008) “Imagining and Promoting the Small-Town Theater.” In K. H. Fuller-Seely (Ed.), Hollywood in the Neighborhood. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press (pp. 169–185).

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PART V

Programming, popularity, and film Introduction

The emergence of new cinema history is closely linked to the critique that mainstream film studies continue to focus primarily on movies in terms of aesthetics, representation, and other textual characteristics rather than on their circulation and reception. Following this critique, new cinema historians argue that within film studies, cinema’s societal, cultural and ideological meanings are explored through the examination of a film’s complex representation or textual mediation of the social world, whereas any attempt to understand cinemagoing practices and experiences is reduced to a commentary on how the film appealed to, or positioned, spectators, and their imagination. This critique of film studies’ textual myopia is also informed by observations that films were only one part of the cinemagoing experience; empirical studies on cinema memories stress that audiences seldom remember the movies they saw, but vividly recall where, how and with whom they went to the pictures. The practices of going to the cinema and watching movies are, and have historically been, intrinsically linked to issues of sociability, communality, and to the place/space of film venues – issues commonly neglected by mainstream film studies. The chapters in this part illustrate that, despite this critique of mainstream film studies, there is no antagonism between new cinema historiography and the examination of films. One important field of research in this direction deals with film programming strategies and practices. The first chapter in this part, by John Sedgwick and Marina Nicoli, concentrates on post-war film programming in one of Italy’s most important film markets. Sedgwick and Nicoli’s study on 1950s film programming in Milan is important because the authors were able to use unique detailed box office records and audience attendance numbers, providing the opportunity to understand more profoundly film diffusion patterns as well as differences in film popularity. The data presented in this chapter suggest that hit films like the Italian romantic comedy Pane, Amore e Fantasia (Titanus, 1953) and Twentieth Century Fox’ first CinemaScope movie The Robe (1953) were lucrative for both distributors and exhibitors. Rather than focusing upon particular movies, however, Sedgwick and Nicoli maintain that it is important to understand wider patterns of film diffusion and popularity in terms of the scale of audiences, the cinemas they attended, the admission prices they paid, the size of the venues they sat in, and the films they saw. The second chapter, by Catherine Jurca, also draws upon a rich programming dataset, covering more than 300 different films shown in 23 Warners theaters in Philadelphia in the

Programming, popularity, and film

mid-1930s. Jurca’s in-depth analysis shows that the business of exhibition was determined by the concrete configuration of theater ownership in a city, and therefore needs to be interpreted on a local level. Arguing that programming is a story of quantity and of providing enough material, Jurca also emphasizes that it was a story of quality as well, mainly in terms of the unpredictability of audience taste and behavior: exhibitors and distributors had to have access to high-quality films that convinced audiences to travel to a particular venue and pay for a watching a particular movie. The following two chapters concentrate on particular series of films. In his contribution Tim Snelson draws on an analysis of a cycle of American “jitterbug pictures” beginning in 1938 and featuring leading swing bandleaders. Using this example of a cross-studio film cycle, Snelson argues that work on popular seriality is important not only for rejecting the primacy of a too narrow focus upon particular films, but also for avoiding temporal linearity in film history. Studying seriality and cyclicality, Snelson maintains, allows film historians to analyze the complex and at times contradictory ways in which movies were conceived during their production, circulation and reception. Lucie Česálková’s ­contribution looks at non-commercial film exhibition strategies in pre-war Czechoslovakia. In her analysis, Česálková contextualizes the co-existence of different forms of theatrical and ­non-theatrical modes of distribution, programming and exhibition in a small film market, where ­institutions which had originally nothing to do with film presentation also entered the field of c­ inema. In her chapter, Česálková argues that these non-film institutions – libraries, ­museums, schools, and religious organizations, which were not motivated by the commercial requirement for profit – were often relatively conservative in terms of the types of films screened, and exerted a powerful influence on Czech film culture. The last chapters in this part focus upon the importance of particular films, maintaining that new cinema history can benefit from looking at individual films. In their contribution Frank Kessler and Sabine Lenk call for an integrated approach to new cinema history. Drawing on three case studies (Georges Méliès’s A Trip to the Moon, 1902; August Blom’s Atlantis (Nordisk, 1913); and films with Sarah Bernhardt), they argue that it is worthwhile to try to combine issues of textual audience appeal, film distribution, advertising and programming, as well as providing a contextualization through which the broader landscape of media and entertainment is taken into account. The last chapter in this part examines the under-researched phenomenon of particular films which continue to circulate in a film market. In his contribution, Karel Dibbets examines the dynamics of exhibiting old films in the Netherlands before 1940, mainly by looking at issues of time and repeated programming on the film market and introducing the concept of the age distribution of films in a particular programming market. In an economic sector with such a high number of commercial flops, Dibbets examines not only these “mayfly films,” as he calls them, but also the much smaller group of “evergreens,” which retained their commercial popularity over a decade or more. His key finding is that as many as a quarter of the films in circulation in the Netherlands in the interwar period had been in circulation for four years or more, indicating the importance of “obsolete” films in the Dutch market. Like the other chapters in this part, Dibbets’ study emphasizes the importance of considering the venues of film exhibition, and their programming profiles, in conjunction with the circulation history of individual films.

270

21 Popular filmgoing in mid-1950s Milan Opening up the “black box” John Sedgwick and Marina Nicoli The material conditions under which movies (as commodities) are produced, sold, and ­consumed form essential aspects of cinema history. Within capitalist economies, the motives of agents engaged in film production and circulation are irrevocably tied up with the pursuit of gain. This pursuit occurs in a risky environment conditioned by audience’s demand for novelty: consumers need to discover what it is that they like and know from past experience that they can be disappointed. Accordingly, if consumers ex ante do not know fully what they want from movies, producers, and by implication, distributors and exhibitors cannot know fully how best to please them. This paper builds upon a theoretical approach to audiences in which filmgoers are treated as heterogeneous: they have preferences, make choices and take risks (Sedgwick and Pokorny, 1998; Sedgwick, 2000). Two key ontological characteristics of film as a commodity when consumed in the cinema are first, that within a framework of generic conventions, film consumers search for novelty, and thus must necessarily be uncertain ex ante about the respective merits of films they have yet to see; and second, that once consumers have made up their minds, they for the greater part consume that film just once. Knowing this, distributors and exhibitors determine industry supply arrangements, using market information about audience intentions to estimate what those choices will be, giving rise to a proximate industry equilibrium, in which films that are popular are made less scarce than films that are not so popular. Given that the film industry operates an invariant pricing strategy, whereby relative popularity is not reflected in higher prices, this adjustment is wholly dependent on supply reacting to demand dynamically (De Vany and Walls, 1996) – an unusual situation, since in most industries price differentials serve to dampen demand for those goods perceived as most desirable. Audiences are thus central to film industry economics and have been since the 1910s, if not before that. As commodities, films have life cycles. This is reflected at a macro level by the length of time they are in circulation and the box office revenues they generate. In contrast, a micro study will reveal the programming histories of films: the cinemas they were screened at and the communities they served. In the process of conducting micro studies, patterns emerge concerning the number, sequence, and social and geographical reach of the cinemas that films progress through. Patterns also emerge about the preferences of audiences. In recording these local life cycles, at a time and place – the films that people paid to see, the cinemas they 271

John Sedgwick and Marina Nicoli

saw them in, and the mechanics by which they got there – a fuller understanding of cinema culture can be had. Accepting the caveat that the extent of the local market is sufficient to provide audiences with a selection of cinemas and film programs to choose between (which is often not the case in smaller rural communities) exhibitors will want to screen those films that people want to see, since more popular films fill more cinema seats. Thus, in any particular locality, film popularity drives programming, with those films that are most popular with audiences being screened more frequently than those that are not. It follows from this that film programs, commonly found in local newspapers, constitute an invaluable source of material for historians interested in constructing bottom-up accounts of popular film. Based upon the micro-foundations of consumer choice on the demand side, and exhibitor contracts with distributors on the supply-side, it is possible to come to an understanding at a particular moment in time of what film played in what cinema, and for how many days.1 The film program typically bundles the film (main feature) together with other components such as shorts, trailers, newsreels and adverts, but for the sake of analytical simplicity, it is assumed that the main feature is the primary attraction for audiences. The confluence of actions that leads a film to be screened at a particular venue at a particular time can be likened to the DNA of a living organism in that it uniquely carries the imprint of those elements that give it its form as a commodity: first, that it has been produced and distributed through numerous contractual transactions; second, that it is screened in a venue that has been built at some point in the past, and is currently staffed; and third, that it attracts consumers in varying numbers, each of whom will have a bank of film consumption experience to draw on, and is sufficiently attracted to the film in question that they set aside the necessary time and pay the price of admission at the box office for the privilege of consuming in their minds the unique set of immaterial images that constitute it. These various elements, each with their distinct history and each requiring the expenditure of physical, financial or intellectual capital, coalesce at the point of consumption at a particular cinema, located somewhere. This conjuncture of film, cinema, and audience is repeated time and time again, at the same cinema on the same day, or on a different day, or at a different cinema in the same living environment, or a different cinema in another environment. In each circumstance, at some point in time, one film is replaced by another and the film that is replaced is screened elsewhere until it is not screened any more. In general, the velocity of film circulation differs greatly, according to the attractiveness of a film and where it might be in the distribution cycle. Other more idiosyncratic factors may also prevail, such as the showing of films with biblical content at times of religious festivals. In this study the films that audiences watched and the means by which they were distributed are investigated. As part of a larger comparative study of filmgoing in Italy, Milan is of particular interest because not only are there records of extant box office returns and audience attendance numbers published by the trade journal Bollettino dello Spettacolo but, uniquely, these are sub-divided into first, second and third category (run) cinemas, thus providing the opportunity to understand better the diffusion process, including differences in film popularity at different points in the cycle.

Context Cinema was a dominant pastime for Italians during the 1950s, with attendances peaking in 1955 (Miskell and Nicoli, 2016). With a population of over 1,328,000, Milan had 215 registered cinemas in 1956. The Italian Society of Authors and Publishers (SIAE/Società Italiana 272

Popular filmgoing in mid-1950s Milan

degli Autori ed Editori) published detailed annual data on the film industry in its organ Annuario dello Spettacolo, showing that the people of Milan paid more for ­cinema tickets than residents elsewhere in Italy at the time. Together with Bologna, Milan was second to Rome in terms of the average number of tickets purchased annually: 33, as against the 35 tickets per head attributed to Roman audiences (Treveri Gennari and Sedgwick, 2015). Appendix 21.1 lists the 112 cinemas that advertized programs in the two evening newspapers Corriere della Sera and La Notte. Rather than use the official categorization determined by a 1952 agreement between the exhibitors and distributors known as the “Unione Nazionale Distributori,” in which six categories of cinema were demarcated (extra, I, II, III, IV, V), this work distinguishes between four types of cinema (first to fourth), determined by two criteria. The first criterion is the admission price; in making the distinction between “Prima visione,” “Secondo passaggio,” and “Terzo passaggio,” the exhibitor’s association’s organ Bollettino dello Spettacolo applied pricing criteria that distinguished between films being screened in cinemas at which the minimum admission price was respectively 400, 260, and 200 lire (L.).2 With the second criterion, the number of distinct film programs screened by each cinema, the analysis determines that the greater the turnover of films, the lower a cinema’s status. In keeping with the general principles of distribution set down in the introduction, the Unione Nazionale Distributori practiced two distinct methods of distribution in Italian cities. The first (intensive) method involved the distributor signing a contract with a single cinema, giving it the exclusive right to premiere a movie, with the additional exclusive right to move it to a named second cinema before releasing it more widely. This method entailed a slower rate of diffusion, but one that exploited the box office potential of cinemas in the upper reaches of the exhibition system, while also economizing on the number of prints in circulation. The second (extensive) method entailed films being premiered to a number of first-run cinemas after which they were shifted to second-run houses, before wider distribution in lower-order cinemas. Trade regulations also stipulated that a clearance period of thirty days should exist between first- and second-run exhibitions, with the second-run house compelled to charge a maximum price that was the same as the minimum price set in the first run. An exception was made for films that opened in a first-run cinema and then moved to another first-run city center cinema (“cinema di proseguimento”). The Unione Nazionale Distributori further distinguished between fixed price and percentage contracts. Fixed price contracts defined the number of programming days, giving exhibitors the opportunity to ask for two additional screening days, which distributors were not compelled to grant. Percentage contracts, on the other hand, defined only the minimum programming duration as well as the minimum box office expected in a working day. Programming could, therefore, continue up to the point at which the daily box office fell below the threshold level established by the contract (“minimo di decadenza”), after which the movie was withdrawn (“smontato”) ­(Gavosto, 1949; Montanari, 1953).

Findings: the system of distribution and exhibition Table 21.1 summarizes the data found in the Appendix, from which the importance of the earnings potential of third- and fourth-run cinemas, when set against the market total, is apparent. Market share (column 7) is derived from an estimate of the potential revenue of cinemas in each run (column 6). Thus, the lower prices and seating capacity of cinemas (in the case of fourth-run cinemas) are more than compensated for by the larger number of cinemas  at the lower end of the market. Clearly, lower-order cinemas were important to 273

John Sedgwick and Marina Nicoli Table 21.1  S ummary statistics describing the characteristics of the different cinema runs in Milan in the mid-1950s Cinemas

(1) First run 10 Second run 7 Third run 20 Fourth run 75 Total 112

Films screened in January 1954 (2) 1–6 5–11 8–14 9–19

Mean minimum prices (L.)

Mean maximum prices (L.)

Mean seating

Potential box Market office revenue* share (L.)

(3)

(4)

(5)

(6)

(7)

1,212 1,236 1,235 864

6,528,034 2,780,357 5,373,773 8,409,904 23,092,067

0.28 0.12 0.23 0.36 1.00

525 314 210 123

580 343 240 151

* To reflect that audiences did not all pay the minimum admission price, the assumption is made that the mean admission price is one quarter of the difference between maximum and minimum prices when added to the minimum admission price. Assuming that all cinemas are equally occupied, potential box-office revenue per screening is the product of this price, the number of cinemas, and mean seating per cinema.

distributors. In order to establish the pattern of distribution, the main features of all 112 ­cinemas that form the population of cinemas that make up this study were collected for January 1954 (1–30 January). As well as lower prices, the key characteristic of the third- and fourth-run cinemas was the higher turnover of films, with just under half the cinemas (55) listed in the Appendix screening three or more distinct features each week. If most cinemas were running multiple change film programs weekly, then it follows that at least some films in circulation were being screened in multiple cinemas. Altogether, 598 films were screened in the 112 cinemas during the course of January 1954, with the median film screened for just three days, while the most widely circulated film (Moulin Rouge, United ­Artists, 1952) accumulated 102 exhibition days, suggesting a highly skewed statistical distribution of screenings. Indeed, of the 3,304 screening days recorded during January 1954, over 27 percent were taken with the twenty most commonly screened films. These are listed in Table 21.2, in which the number of exhibition days attributed to a film (column 2) should be read in conjunction with the number of cinemas at which it was screened (column 3). Thus, Moulin Rouge appeared on 21 distinct cinema programs, just a little under one-fifth of all of the cinemas in the population that forms this study. Compare the statistics of this film with those of La Tunica (The Robe, 20th Century Fox, 1953), Le avventure di Peter Pan (Peter Pan, Disney, 1953) and Pane, Amore e Fantasia (Titanus, 1953). These films just creep into the table with thirty exhibition days, but significantly they are screened only in one cinema apiece – respectively at the first-run Capitol, Ariston, and Corso cinemas. It is also evident from the exhibition of The ­Master of Ballantrae (Il principe di Scozia, Warner Bros., 1953) that the thirty-day clearance between first and second runs stipulated in the “Unione Nazionale Distributori” was not always upheld. By restricting analysis to those 598 films that were screened at least once in the population of 112 cinemas, Table 21.2 presents a temporal cross-section of popular films at various stages in their exhibition run. The Robe, Peter Pan and Pane, Amore e Fantasia are caught at the first stage of their life cycles in the cinemas of Milan, released respectively on 5, 25, 26 December 1953 and screened continuously for 63, 43, and 38 days. Moulin Rouge, on the other hand, was coming to the end of its life cycle: first released on 5 November 1953, the film entered the second run on 1 December and third run on 31 December 1953. Accordingly, the 102 days of screening it accumulated in January 1954 were exclusively in third- and fourth-run cinemas. 274

Popular filmgoing in mid-1950s Milan Table 21.2  T  he twenty most screened films in Milan in January 1954 Film

Release date Screen days

Number Star1 of cinemas (4) (5)

Star2

Distributor

Nationality

(1)

(2)

(6)

(7)

(8)

Moulin Rouge Anni facili

05/11/1953 102 01/12/1953 68

21 14

Ferrer, J Taranto, N

Gabor, Z Tonti, A

Lucrezia Borgia

02/12/1953

62

15

Carol, M

The Mississippi gambler The merry widow The girl who had everything Cinema d’altri tempi Plymouth Adventure The master of Ballantrae Il nemico pubblico No.1 Never let me go Amore in città Shane South Sea Woman Un capriccio di Caroline Cherie The greatest show on earth The robe

13/11/1953

60

15

28/10/1953 15/12/1953

59 53

17/12/1953

(3)

US Italy

Power, T

Dear-UA Paramount (Italy) Armendariz, Dear P Laurie, P Universal

13 13

Turner. L Taylor, E

Lamas, F Lamas, F

MGM MGM

US US

45

13

Chiari, W

Padovani, L

Diana

Italy

31/10/1953

45

12

Tracey, S

Tierney, G

MGM

US

30/12/1953

45

10

Flynn, E

Livesey, R

Warner Bros. US

22/12/1953

42

10

Fernandel

Gabor, Z

Enic

France/Italy

30/11/1953 30/11/1953 18/11/1953 15/01/1954 19/11/1953

36 35 35 33 32

9 8 12 7 10

Gable, C Tognazzi, U Ladd, A Lancaster, B Pascal, J.C

Tierney, G Cifariello, A Arthur, J Mayo, V Carol, M

MGM Volcine Paramount Warner Bros. Titanus

US Italy Italy US France

19/02/1953

30

7

Heston, C

Stewart, J

Paramount

US

05/12/1953

30

1

Burton, R

Simmons, J

Peter Pan

25/12/1953

30

1

20th US Century Fox Disney US

Le vacanze del Signor Hulot Pane, amore e fantasia

22/10/1953

30

4

Tati, J

Pascaud, N

Diana

France

26/12/1953

30

1

Lollobrigida, G De Sica, V

Titanus

Italy

Italy/France US

Normally, films screened in the first run were exclusive to a single cinema, where they were held over until the box office they generated fell below a particular threshold, at which point they were substituted. This is also the case for the second run, where on some occasions popular films were screened not in designated second-run cinemas, but first-run houses, contrasting sharply with the diffusion of films into the third and fourth runs where the most popular films were screened for a number of days in multiple cinemas, often ­simultaneously. By way of example, on 23 January 1954 the popular Anni Facile (Paramount, 1953), ­starring Nino Taranto and Alda Magnini, was programmed as the main feature at the Alfieri, 275

Table 21.3  The distribution of Anni Facile through the cinemas of Milan, 1953–1954 1–16 December

5–12 13–18 20 21 22 23 24 25 29 30 31 4 5 6 7 12 13 14 19 20 21 January January January January January January January January January January January February February February February February February February February February February

16 8 6 6 6 6 6 1

1

1

1

1

1

1

1

1

1

1

1

1

1

1

1

1

1

1

1

1

1

1

1 1

1

1 1

1

1

1

1

1

1 1

1

1 1

1

1

1

1

1

1

1

1

Popular filmgoing in mid-1950s Milan Table 21.4  Differences in the number of days between first- and third-run exhibition by the major distributors Distributor Ceiad Dear Fox MGM Paramount Titanus Warner Bros

Number of films in sample

Mean difference in days

14 11 11 14 16 6 8

97 56 76 66 90 47 51

Standard deviation

Coefficient of variation

82.46 40.59 76.96 26.50 65.14 21.95 30.98

0.85 0.72 1.01 0.40 0.73 0.47 0.61

­ rgentina, Aurora, Cristallo, Delle Stelle, and Istria cinemas. Table 21.3 details the distribuA tion of the film from its initial release on 1 December at the Missori where it was screened for sixteen days, through to its second-run release of eight days at the Del Verme, after which it was screened at nineteen third- and fourth-run cinemas for a total another 76 days between 13 January and 21 February 1954. Of those films screened in Milan in January 1954, the earliest release date into the first run was Il più grande spettacolo del mondo (The Greatest Show on Earth, Paramount, 1952), which premiered jointly at the Odeon and Arlecchino on 19 February 1953 and then was screened for 57 days consecutively in first run, after which it got a second run screening at the ­A rlecchino, where it was screened for nineteen consecutive days from 25 September, before being transferred to six cinemas in the third run for fifteen days on 29 October. Table 21.2 shows that as late as January 1954 the film was screened at seven (third- and fourth-run) cinemas, accumulating thirty exhibition days. At the other end of the temporal spectrum, The Robe did not open in the third run until 22 September 1954, where it was screened in three cinemas for thirteen exhibition days. Thus, these two major US releases drew sizeable audiences for the best part of a year. In contrast only 68 days separated the first and third runs opening of the highly popular Pane, Amore e Fantasia. Indeed, for the 119 films for which we have first- and third-run data, the median difference between the first night in the first and third runs was 56 days. With a weak correlation (r = 0.14) between these dates and box office, the inference can be drawn that distributors organized their diffusion policy on a film-by-film basis. This is borne out by the findings presented in Table 21.4 that show medium to high levels of variance (coefficient of variation) around the mean associated with the length of time taken by the major distributors to move their films from the first to the third run: it would appear that different distributors practiced differential film diffusion strategies depending on the film in question.

Findings: box office and film popularity The investigation up to this point presents a cross-section of the programming characteristics of the cinemas of Milan and illustrates the pattern of diffusion that the most popular films could expect during their period in circulation. However, while the films presented in Table 21.2 were indeed popular, an account of their degree of popularity in Milan requires an investigation of the box office/audiences (or their proxy, such as POPSTAT) generated by each of the 598 films in the dataset. 3 Fortunately, a shortcut is possible since the exhibitor’s 277

John Sedgwick and Marina Nicoli

association (AGIS) published fortnightly on the most successful films screened in ­M ilan’s first-, second-, and third-run cinemas in their journal Bollettino dello Spettacolo. Of the 598 films, only 184 appear in the Bollettino listings, suggesting that the remaining 414 films were exhibited in fourth-run cinemas only. The implication of this is that there were a very large number of films doing very little business: as indicated earlier, over half of the 598 films were screened for three days or less in January 1954, sharing the lower tiers of cinemas with those more successful films on their journey through the exhibition tiers. As shown earlier, Table 21.1 provides an estimation of the box office potential of the various runs, indicating that the lower two tiers of cinema were extremely important to the exhibition sector as a whole, contributing a potential of 60 percent of the box office. Table 21.5 presents the most popular films screened in Milan. With the exception of Il  più grande spettacolo del mondo, and Puccini (Rizzoli/Dear, 1953), which were released earlier in the year, the table comprises the twenty most popular films released into the first run during the final four months of 1953 and January 1954. Dominated by Hollywood, the list includes two Top 10 Italian films, Pane, Amore e Fantasia, and Il Ritorno di Don Camillo (Rizzoli/Dear, 1953). Of the top grossing films released in Rome recorded by Bollettino dello Spettacolo for the same period, twelve of the twenty were common to Milan (Treveri Gennari and Sedgwick, 2015: 91). Table 21.5 includes the earnings of the first three tiers of cinema exhibition, and shows the relatively wide disparity of earnings between them, with some films performing exceptionally well in the first run – Hans Christian Anderson (Goldwyn/RKO, 1952), The Robe, Les vacances de Monsieur Hulot (Discina, 1953), and Peter Pan; some in the second run – Quo Vadis? (MGM, 1951); and some in the third run – ­Salome (Columbia, 1953) and Lucrezia Borgia (Filmsonor/Dear, 1953). As estimated in ­Table 21.1, the earnings of the third run on average exceed those of the second run. This is reflected in Table 21.5. Unfortunately, the earnings of cinemas outside these three runs are not recorded and so the conclusion about the size of fourth-run earnings set out in Table 21.1 cannot be corroborated. Finally, in Table 21.5 film popularity is indicated by box office, the argument being that the greater the box office, the greater the size of the audience. However, as discussed, the share of the box office varied widely across the first three runs according to which film is under the spotlight. This division is further explored in Table 21.6 by incorporating the audience data published in Bollettino dello Spettacolo into the analysis, giving a yet clearer indication of the importance of third-run cinemas in generating audiences. Sourced by Bollettino dello Spettacolo, the record of audience size is far from complete: of the films listed in Table 21.6, audience data is missing for Shane (Paramount, 1953, first run), Puccini (first run), Pane, amore e fantasia (second run), Giuseppe Verdi (PAT, 1953, first run), Anni facile (second run), Quo vadis? (first and second runs). Altogether, fifteen films are represented in Table 21.6, with Moulin Rouge appearing three times and, The Robe, Pane, amore e fantasia, and Il ritorno di Don Camillo twice. Of the twenty largest audiences fourteen are recorded in the third run, five in the first run and one in the second run. Eight of these featured were Italian films, two of which, Giuseppe Verdi and Puccini (both recorded in the third run), were opera based biographical pictures, perhaps understandable given Milan’s reputation as a center for opera. Derived by dividing box office (column 7) by audience size (column 6) the mean price of admission paid by each of these audiences is given in column 8, ranging from just over 700 lire paid to watch The Robe in the first-run to less than 200 lire paid by audiences to see Il ritorno di Don Camillo in the third run. 278

Table 21.5  B  ox office Top twenty of films screened in Milan at least once during January 1954 Box office rank

Film

Distributor

Opening date Total box office First-run box (L.) office (L.)

Proportion of total

Second-run box Proportion office (L.) of total

Third-run box office (L.)

 1  2

The robe The greatest show on earth Moulin Rouge Pane, amore e fantasia Il ritorno di Don Camillo Roman Holiday Quo Vadis? Salome Shane Le vacanze del signor Hulot Puccini Quando le donne amano Hans Christian Anderson Lucrezia Borgia Peter Pan Lili The Prisoner of Zenda Julius Ceasar Anni facili The master of Ballantrae

Fox Paramount

05/12/1953 10/02/1953

113,271,286 99,216,560

69,325,940 39,747,580

0.61 0.40

23,214,180 22,268,910

0.20 0.22

20,731,166 37,200,070

0.18 0.37

Dear-UA Titanus

05/11/1953 26/12/1953

92,961,605 88,478,155

43,311,550 48,798,050

0.47 0.55

33,607,540 21,004,010

0.36 0.24

16,042,515 18,676,095

0.17 0.21

Dear

24/09/1953

75,728,405

40,962,240

0.54

14,117,400

0.19

20,648,765

0.27

Paramount MGM Ceiad Paramount Alba

23/12/1953 29/10/1953 30/10/1953 18/11/1953 22/10/1953

75,048,165 66,587,350 54,754,820 51,586,184 50,214,250

33,343,265 20,789,420 20,746,725 20,789,429 30,137,260

0.44 0.31 0.38 0.40 0.60

14,919,915 28,319,420 11,961,195 7,801,225 17,374,550

0.20 0.43 0.22 0.15 0.35

26,784,985 17,478,510 22,046,900 22,995,530 2,702,440

0.36 0.26 0.40 0.45 0.05

Dear Ceiad

30/04/1953 11/09/1954

49,106,400 46,410,652

19,029,360 20,118,380

0.39 0.43

9,706,800 9,140,910

0.20 0.20

20,370,240 17,151,362

0.41 0.37

RKO

29/09/1953

43,554,320

27,877,310

0.64

9,983,735

0.23

5,693,275

0.13

Dear RKO MGM MGM

02/12/1953 25/12/1953 18/12/1953 22/12/1953

39,591,725 39,530,230 38,783,490 38,421,557

12,736,000 23,836,140 17,822,150 16,213,220

0.32 0.60 0.46 0.42

7,233,005 10,102,535 12,307,280 12,414,282

0.18 0.26 0.32 0.32

19,622,720 5,591,555 8,654,060 9,794,055

0.50 0.14 0.22 0.25

MGM Paramount (Italy) WB

23/12/1953 01/12/1953 30/12/1953

37,516,560 36,754,140 34,954,750

21,419,030 12,109,770 12,848,540

0.57 0.33 0.37

6,026,270 8,311,430 5,591,365

0.16 0.23 0.16

10,071,260 16,332,940 16,514,845

0.27 0.44 0.47

 3  4  5  6  7  8  9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20

Proportion of total

Table 21.6  Top twenty audiences by run for those films on release in Milan in January 1954 Rank (1)

Film (2)

Distributor (3)

 1  2  3  4  5  6  7  8  9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20

Il ritorno di Don Camillo Salome The robe Shane Roman Holiday Puccini The robe Pane, amore e fantasia Moulin Rouge Pane, amore e fantasia Giuseppe Verdi Lucrezia Borgia Moulin Rouge The greatest show on earth Il ritorno di Don Camillo The master of Ballantrae Anni facili Story of three loves Quo Vadis? Moulin Rouge

Dear Ceiad Fox Paramount Paramount Dear Fox Titanus Dear Titanus Pat Dear Dear Paramount Dear WB Paramount MGM MGM Dear

Cinema run (4) 3 3 1 3 3 3 3 1 2 3 3 3 1 1 1 3 3 3 3 3

Opening date (5)

Audience (6)

Box office (L.) (7)

30/11/1953 23/11/1953 05/12/1953 27/12/1953 10/02/1954 25/09/1953 22/09/1954 26/12/1953 01/12/1953 04/03/1954 03/03/1954 06/01/1954 05/11/1953 10/02/1953 24/09/1953 27/01/1954 13/01/1954 10/03/1954 19/02/1954 31/12/1953

107,181 100,045 98,805 98,111 96,730 96,388 95,807 95,243 92,906 88,471 86,854 82,723 77,764 73,946 73,482 73,261 71,913 71,848 68,680 67,074

20,648,765 22,046,900 69,325,940 22,995,530 26,784,985 20,370,240 20,731,166 48,798,050 33,607,540 18,676,095 19,696,915 19,622,720 43,311,550 39,747,580 40,962,240 16,514,845 16,332,940 16,289,700 17,478,510 16,042,515

Mean admission price (L.) (8) 193 220 702 234 277 211 216 512 362 211 227 237 557 538 557 225 227 227 254 239

Popular filmgoing in mid-1950s Milan

Discussion and conclusion Audiences once represented a black box for film historians in that they were assumed rather than analyzed: they were left unconsidered and undifferentiated. For instance, in their path-breaking The Classical Hollywood Cinema, Bordwell, Staiger and Thompson (1985) concentrate on Hollywood as a “system of production”, in which “Audience Research” is referenced just once in the index and “Audiences” not at all. However, as a consequence of a series of pioneering micro-studies including Fuller-Seeley (1996), Kuhn (2002), Richards and Sheridan (1987), Waller (1995), and essays contained in three volumes edited by Stokes and Maltby (1999a, 1999b) and Maltby, Stokes and Allen (2007), this is no longer the case. Along with films, audiences matter. Not surprisingly the pattern of film distribution found in Milan, a cross section of which is reported in Table 21.2, corresponds with that found in Rome, with the most popular films (listed in Table 21.5) screened at designated first-run cinemas for ­multiple weeks before going into the second, third, and fourth run cinemas. In addition, twelve of the Top twenty films in each city are in common, suggesting strong similarities in preferences. Details of the characteristics of each run can be found in Table 21.1. The distribution profile of the popular Italian film Anni facili ranked nineteenth in Table 21.5, is the subject of Table 21.3. Instructively, the film appeared at nineteen third- and fourthrun cinemas in little more than a month, after substantial first and second runs in single cinemas. (Differences, by distributor, in the number of days that separate first- to thirdrun exhibitions are depicted in Table 21.4.) It is inconceivable that Anni facili would have received as many distinct billings had it not been popular with the audiences that frequented lower-order cinemas. Indeed, Table 21.5 shows that Anni facili garnered more of its earnings from third-run cinemas (44 percent) than it had from those in the first run (33 percent), and Table 21.6 shows its third-run audience was among the twenty highest. Indeed, one of the strong discoveries of this chapter is the significance of the third- and fourth runs in generating audience size and revenue. In contrast with the considerable number of screenings given to the most successful films, however, multiple weekly change cinemas such as the Sempione needed multiple product: the median number of screening days for the 598 films screened at least once in Milan in January 1954 was just three. There was a lot of debris, including the old films that Karel Dibbets terms “evergreens,” in circulation. Published in Bollettino dello Spettacolo, the box office returns of films screened in first-, second-, and third-run cinemas in 1950s Milan, along with the size of the audience garnered by them, is a rare and invaluable source of information for the film historian. As with Anni facili we are able to show that for many films repeated screenings in third-run cinemas generated significantly larger audience numbers than in their first-run screenings. And this before the unknown fourth run is factored in. From this study, it is clear that not only first- and second-run audiences made choices and had preferences. Although not undertaken here, textual analysis might provide the key to explaining these choices, perhaps in conjunction with an analytical approach that investigates the particular differential characteristics of respective films. To our knowledge, the only other comparable source is the Weekly Billing Sheets of the Stanley Warner chain in mid-1930’s Philadelphia (see Jurca and Sedgwick, 2014). Unlike the Weekly Billing Sheets, the entries in Bollettino dello Spettacolo are not cinema specific and thus give no clue about the nature of the contract between distributors and exhibitors. In Philadelphia, distributors commonly charged third- and fourth-run exhibitors 281

John Sedgwick and Marina Nicoli

a fixed sum to screen a film for a few days, thereby ensuring a guaranteed return. But not always: when a film offered the prospect of larger than normal takings, distributors charged percentage rates. As indicated earlier, fixed or percentage contracts also prevailed in Italy. However, it is only possible to surmise which films were distributed by what type of contract in the Milanese market, although it is highly likely that the contractual decision was determined by the same economic logic: that of maximizing revenue for the distributor. The data presented in the chapter suggests “hit” films were lucrative for both distributors and exhibitors in the lower-run sector. The programming data that informs Tables 21.2 and 21.3 support these conclusions, indicating the intensity of the circulation of the most popular films; of how hard their distributors worked them. These findings are derived from a simple methodology that entails identifying a population of cinemas, counting the films that are programmed at those cinemas, summing the length of time they are screened for, classifying cinemas into runs, and applying descriptive statistics. The main claim for this method is that it opens up the practice of going to the cinema at a juncture in time, making explicit the scale of audiences, the cinemas they attended, the admission prices they paid, the size of the auditoria they sat in, and the films that they watched. Aggregated, this information yields statistics that describe the pattern of film diffusion and popularity. Un-aggregated it indicates events, times and places, which can be supplemented by local sources and (where possible) oral histories. Thus, maps can be made of these locations and of the flow of films between them. Information from census records, local directories, and newspapers can give form to the communities that host particular cinemas: included in this might be their demographic character and occupational structure, as well as the density of social organizations such as the church and alternative sources of entertainment. In this way the black box is opened and cinema understood as a social activity based around the attraction of film, both generically and individually.

Appendix 21.1  Milan’s principal cinemas organized into runs (first to fourth), 1953–1954 Cinema (1) Angelycum Quirinetta* Ariston Arlecchino Astra Capitol Corso Manzoni Mignon Missori Odeon Colosseo Corallo Dal Verme Diana

Films shown in January 1954 (2) 4 1 2 3 1 1 5 2 4 5 8 8 5 5

Run (3)

Minimum price (L.) (4)

Maximum price (L.) (5)

Seating capacity (6)

1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 2 2 2 2

250 600 600 500 600 500 600 600 500 500 250 300 350 350

500 600 600 600 600 500 600 600 600 600 300 300 400 400

436 560 412 1144 1375 1600 1800 543 1900 2347 1974 600 1876 1800

282

Cinema (1)

Films shown in January 1954 (2)

Run (3)

Minimum price (L.) (4)

Maximum price (L.) (5)

Seating capacity (6)

Eden Filodrammatici Rivoli Alcione Argentina Arti Carcano Teatro Cielo Delle Stelle Diamante Giardini Gloria Impero Modernissimo Orchidea Orfeo Pace T.° Piccolo Eden Plinius Roma Smeraldo Tonale Zenith A.B.C. Abel Abruzzi Adriano Adua Albanera Alce Alfieri Alhambra Alpi Ambrosiano Anteo Apollo Argo Ariosto Ars Astoria Astro Atlantico

8 11 3 10 10 9 8 8 11 13 11 8 8 9 14 9 9 9 10 9 9 10 9 14 9 11 14 14 12 14 14 11 14 9 12 12 14 11 14 11 13 10

2 2 2 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4

300 300 350 200 200 200 200 200 200 200 200 200 200 250 250 200 200 250 200 200 250 200 200 100 150 150 100 100 150 150 150 150 100 150 150 100 150 170 100 100 120 100

300 300 400 250 200 250 200 250 200 250 250 250 250 250 250 200 250 250 250 250 250 250 250 120 200 200 120 100 220 200 200 180 120 200 200 135 200 170 120 130 140 140

1000 600 800 1900 1100 850 1200 1231 1150 780 377 1500 1563 420 190 2300 1300 1400 1700 800 2300 846 1800 400 1162 810 1300 240 1200 1200 1200 500 1400 2300 850 1182 870 400 800 400 Not known 400

Augusteo T.

10

4

150

200

1192 (Continued)

Cinema (1)

Films shown in January 1954 (2)

Run (3)

Minimum price (L.) (4)

Maximum price (L.) (5)

Seating capacity (6)

Aurora Cantù Centrale Cittanova Cristallo Dante Dea Donizetti Ducale Duse Eolo Europa Farini Fossati Garibaldi Ideale Imperia Iris Istria Italia Luna Lux Magenta Marconi Massimo Meda Meravigli Minerva Modena Moderno Nazionale Novecento Olimpo Pacini Padova Pellico Perla Poliziano Porpora Rialto Rosa Rossini Rubino Savona

10 13 10 12 13 10 14 10 13 14 12 14 14 12 9 13 13 13 14 9 13 15 13 13 9 14 7 15 12 14 8 12 13 14 13 11 13 11 1 12 15 2 13 19

4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4

150 100 90 80 130 120 100 140 150 135 140 60 100 150 150 150 100 120 140 150 100 80 150 130 180 100 150 100 120 120 150 140 120 100 120 100 120 150 120 180 75 150 100 80

200 100 90 100 180 120 130 190 180 135 140 80 120 190 200 180 130 150 190 150 120 100 170 130 200 140 150 120 150 150 250 170 140 130 150 130 150 200 150 180 105 150 100 100

1050 160 251 502 1420 500 1200 1066 1180 1024 600 800 750 1150 582 900 610 700 150 1780 700 1225 700 450 1865 690 260 600 800 678 2160 1076 675 1300 972 320 707 1700 780 711 1200 520 170 650

Popular filmgoing in mid-1950s Milan Cinema (1)

Films shown in January 1954 (2)

Run (3)

Minimum price (L.) (4)

Maximum price (L.) (5)

Seating capacity (6)

Sempione Susa Umbria Venezia Vittoria Volta Vox X Cine XXII Marzo (Ex Imperiale) Zara Zeus

13 13 14 16 10 13 9 15 15

4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4

150 100 100 100 80 120 140 80 100

150 130 120 100 120 120 190 130 130

380 1100 700 400 500 1250 1180 1200 550

14 13

4 4

120 140

160 160

802 800

* Although the minimum price of 250 lire suggests that Angelycum Quirinetta should be classified as a third-run cinema, the cinema’s listing in La Notte (grouped with other first-run cinemas), its relatively low velocity of circulation and its high maximum price of 500 lire suggest that the cinema was a first-run cinema. Sources: Corriere della Sera, La Notte.

Notes 1 For respective accounts of film scheduling in Philadelphia, 1935–1936; The Netherlands, ­1934–1936; Sydney, 1934; and Rome, 1953–1954, the reader is referred to Jurca and Sedgwick (2015); Pafort-Overduin (2011); Sedgwick, Pafort-Overduin, and Boter (2012); Sedgwick, Pokorny, and Miskell (2014); and Treveri Gennari and Sedgwick (2015). 2 In 1954, exchange rates were US$1:625 lire and UK£1:1755 lire (Banca d’Italia). 3 POPSTAT is a method for estimating the box office popularity, based upon films and the cinemas at which they were screened. See Sedgwick (2000); Sedgwick, Pafort-Overduin, and Boter (2012); and Sedgwick, Pokorny, and Miskell (2014).

References Bordwell, D., Staiger, J., and Thompson, K. (1985) The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style and Mode of Production to 1960. London: Routledge. De Vany, A. and Walls, W. (1996) “Bose-Einstein Dynamics and Adaptive Contracting in the Motion Picture Industry.” Economic Journal 106: 1493–1514. Fuller-Seeley, K. (1996) At the Picture Show: Small-Town Audiences and the Creation of Movie Fan Culture. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press. Gavosto, C. (1949) L’amministrazione economica delle imprese di proiezione. Turin: Giappichelli. Jurca, C. and Sedgwick, J. (2014) “The Film’s the Thing: Moviegoing in Philadelphia, 1935–36.” Film History 26(4): 58–83. Kuhn, A. (2002) An Everyday Magic: Cinema and Cultural Memory. London: I.B. Tauris. Maltby, R., Stokes, M., and Allen, R., (eds.) (2007) Going to the Movies: Hollywood and the Social Experience of Cinema. Exeter: Exeter University Press. Miskell, P. and Nicoli, M. (2016) “From Outsiders to Insiders? Strategies and Practices of American Film Distributors in Postwar Italy.” Enterprise and Society 17(3): 546–590. Montanari, M. (1953) Guido Ricciotti, la disciplina giuridica della cinematigrafica. Florence: Cya Editore. Pafort-Overduin, C. (2011) “Distribution and Exhibition in the Netherlands, 1934–1936.” In R. Maltby, D. Biltereyst, and Ph. Meers (eds.) Explorations in New Cinema History. Approaches and Case Studies. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell (pp. 125–139). Richards, J. and Sheridan, D. (eds.) (1987) Massobservation at the Movies. London: RKP.

285

John Sedgwick and Marina Nicoli Sedgwick, J. (2000) Popular Filmgoing in 1930s Britain: A Choice of Pleasures. Exeter: Exeter University Press. Sedgwick, J., Pafort-Overduin, C., and Boter, J. (2012) “Explanations for the Restrained Development of the Dutch Cinema Market in the 1930s.” Enterprise and Society 13(3): 634–671. Sedgwick, J. and Pokorny, M. (1998) “The Risk Environment of Film-Making: Warners in the ­Inter-War Period.” Explorations in Economic History 35: 196–220. Sedgwick, J., Pokorny, M., and Miskell, P. (2014) “Hollywood in the World Market – Evidence from Australia in the Mid-1930s.” Business History 56(5): 689–723. Stokes, M. and Maltby, R., (eds.) (1999a) Identifying Hollywood’s Audiences: Cultural Identity and the ­Movies. London: British Film Institute. Stokes, M. and Maltby, R. (eds.) (1999b) American Movie Audiences: From the Turn of the Century to the Early Sound Era. London: British Film Institute. Treveri Gennari, D. and Sedgwick, J. (2015) “Memories in Context: the Social and Economic Function of Cinema in 1950s Rome.” Film History 27(2): 76–104. Waller, G. (1995) Main Street Amusements: Movies and Commercial Entertainment in a Southern City, ­1896–1930. Washington DC: Smithsonian Institution Press.

286

22 DISTRIBUTION AND EXHIBITION IN WARNER BROS. PHILADELPHIA THEATERS, 1935–1936 Catherine Jurca Before we heed the new cinema history’s call for “the possibility of film scholarship without films,” it is worth considering why individual films have captured so much attention for so long (Smoodin, 2007: 2). In the classical Hollywood era, a handful of major companies controlled production, distribution, and exhibition but billed themselves first and foremost to the public as makers of movies. Their rhetorical currency was the exciting individual release: the star-studded extravaganza, the meritorious programmer, and even, on occasion and with much self-congratulation, the unforeseen sleeper. The publicity machinery, including the ancillary world of fan magazines and gossip columns, revolved around the potential “hit” and the stars whose box office value helped to secure popular success. These were the projects that could be promoted to the hilt, that audiences most relished, that filled seats and the coffers of theaters and studios alike. One thing the new cinema history has helped to identify is the voracious appetite for film, (almost) any film, among the thousands of theaters nationwide that changed programs three or more days a week. It is in part the sheer volume of films that, paradoxically, makes the idea of film scholarship without films imaginable. What has aptly been called the “maw of exhibition” required a continuous supply of product, much of which necessarily fell short of the industry’s lofty promises and public account of itself (Balio, 1995: 73). Compulsory block booking, a trade practice that forced independent exhibitors to lease as much as a company’s entire annual product, the bad with the good, to get any films at all, created a guaranteed market for a company’s weaker films that exhibitors might otherwise have scorned to play. For years compulsory block booking was at the heart of government investigations of antitrust practices within the film industry. But many independents who complained bitterly about the practice nonetheless argued against legislation to eliminate it, on the grounds that it was the only way to assure the steady supply of films on which their theaters depended ( Jurca, 2016). For an industry driven by the consumer demand for novelty, quantity mattered every bit as much as quality. Compulsory block booking was often considered a discriminatory trade practice because it applied only to independents, not to the major companies that were their suppliers but also their competitors as theater owners. The majors had their pick of films, and they screened them first and longest at the nation’s best theaters – the opulent and expensive movie “palaces” in large cities – that were mostly owned or controlled by the five largest companies: 287

Catherine Jurca

Loew’s (MGM), Paramount, RKO, Twentieth Century Fox, and Warner Bros. These ­companies also owned theater chains concentrated in different regions. The crucial symbiotic relationship among the major companies as distributors of films to each other’s theaters yielded the important insight that the highly publicized competition between Hollywood studios for talent, audiences, and revenue belied the fundamental corporate cooperation, or what the government would call conspiracy, that made the system work (Gomery, 1986). Warner Bros. owned an extensive chain of theaters in the Philadelphia area. Weekly billing sheets kept by these theaters can further our understanding of how a large volume of films moved between theaters to serve up daily entertainment for local audiences. The sheets run from 1935 to 1936 and are located in the Warner Bros. Archives at the University of Southern California. They include information about film programs, rentals paid to distributors, and daily box office revenue. They cover all but one of Philadelphia’s first-run movie theaters (the Fox, which was owned by Twentieth Century Fox and ran its films exclusively) as well as dozens of subsequent-run houses throughout the downtown and city neighborhoods. Given the limited knowledge about what historical audiences thought of the films they saw, box office revenue provides a useful proxy for the popularity of individual films (Sedgwick and Pokorny, 1998). Such granular data make it possible to trace films’ movement and earnings relationally and systematically, allowing us to consider the profile and function of different theaters, and the appeal of the films they played, within a dense, interrelated, and overlapping network of cinematic opportunities. By reintroducing the individual film here, I seek to create a bridge between the new cinema history and a more traditional approach to the study of film. The problem has been less the traditional film scholar’s preoccupation with individual films, and studios, stars, and directors, than indifference to seeing them within the context of the industrial apparatus as a whole. The film industry was as inconceivable without the massive distribution system that efficiently transferred thousands of reels of film every day as it would have been without studios to make them. To focus so much on production is to fail to see that theaters were not the end of the line for films but, rather, the beginning of a crucial feedback process, captured in box office reports like those produced by Warner Bros. managers, on which future production plans depended. Audiences often, but not always, went to theaters because they were attracted to individual films; this was particularly true at first-run theaters, which charged the highest prices, in essence, a premium, to audiences for the privilege of seeing the most promising new films immediately upon release. Distribution and exhibition were set up not only to facilitate the smooth flow of a vast quantity of product, so that there was always something to see in theaters, but also to ensure that the most popular films were as widely available as p­ ossible – at more theaters, for an extended time, across a range of prices (Sedgwick and Pokorny, 2012). Film scholars should consider that understanding how films moved, how often and at what types of theaters they played, and which films were most successful with audiences enriches our understanding of individual films and the studios that made them by tying them to the local context in which audiences encountered them. By remembering that individual films often mattered to audiences, new cinema history can generate a more robust conception of them that downplays mystifying associations with abstractions like glamour or stardom to situate them squarely within the material processes of getting audiences into theaters. This essay draws on a sample, first compiled by John Sedgwick, of twenty-three ­Warners theaters in Philadelphia (among some eighty in the city) and the data from 325 d­ ifferent films they screened over thirty-three billing weeks, from the week ending Saturday, 16 ­November 1935 through the week ending Saturday, 27 June 1936. It includes all first- and second-run theaters in the downtown through to a sample of second-, third-, and fourth-run 288

Distribution and exhibition

neighborhood houses (run refers to the temporal order in which theaters screened feature films). Because films took time to circulate in different runs, screenings and earnings that came outside the thirty-three-week period of focus are also counted to develop a more complete picture of the paths these films took. Fortunately for researchers, Warners only screened single-feature programs, which means that we need not guess which feature audiences might have been more interested in. Warners had four film-only first-run theaters in Philadelphia. The Aldine, Boyd, Stanley, and Stanton were all located downtown. The vast majority of their films played for at least a week and often much longer if warranted by box office returns; only a few disappeared early due to especially weak performance. Warners developed a strategy for organizing releases at these theaters, adapting to the market reality that there were not enough new films likely to prove popular with audiences for four first-run theaters, especially with the Fox consuming all of that company’s product. The Boyd and Stanley were the most similar and conventional first-run theaters. They both had a top ticket price of fifty-five cents; the Stanley seated 3,009 to the Boyd’s 2,338. They drew most of their product from Warner Bros., MGM, and Paramount, with the ­Stanley playing nine, eight, and eleven films, and the Boyd seven, eleven, and nine films, from each, respectively. This left little time for other producers. RKO captured only four slots at the Stanley and three at the Boyd, and Columbia and Universal fewer than that. All United Artists (UA) films went to the Aldine, an anomaly I will discuss later. The Boyd and the Stanley played comedies and dramas, but there was some revealing specialization as well. With the notable exception of Rose-Marie (MGM, 1936), the Stanley played the musicals, including the two highest earning films in the entire sample, the Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers vehicles Top Hat (RKO, 1935) and Follow the Fleet (RKO, 1936). It also played spectacular, big-budget adventure films such as MGM’s China Seas (1935), the hugely successful Mutiny on the Bounty (MGM, 1935), and Warners’ own Captain Blood (1935). The Boyd also screened adaptations of literary classics and historical biographies, including Anna Karenina (MGM, 1935), A Tale of Two Cities (MGM, 1935), The Story of Louis Pasteur (Warner Bros., 1936), and The White Angel (Warner Bros., 1936), about Florence Nightingale. These titles suggest a tendency toward quality films aimed at audiences with an appetite for classier fare (even in Rose-Marie, Jeanette MacDonald played an opera singer), but the Boyd played cinematic trifles as well, such as the comedy She Married Her Boss (Columbia, 1935) and Whipsaw (1935), an MGM crime drama starring Mirna Loy and Spencer Tracy, fresh from Fox. At least as important, it was the obvious crowd-pleasers, those films most likely to attract the largest audiences, that were generally steered to the more capacious Stanley, including all three Clark Gable films. Seven of the ten highest-grossing films across all theaters opened there, as opposed to just two at the Boyd. The Stanley had more seats to fill and did so; its films earned $14,200 on average, compared to $12,600 at the Boyd (all amounts are rounded to the nearest $100). The relative parity in screenings among Warner Bros., MGM, and Paramount films at the city’s largest and most important movie theaters supports F. Andrew Hanssen’s point that first-run theaters of the majors did not favor their own products when they played films from multiple producers. Looking at billing sheets from Warners first-run theaters across Wisconsin, he found that screening days were divided nearly equally among the five major companies’ films and attributes such egalitarian treatment to vertical integration; it would have “defeated the purpose” of corporate cooperation to discriminate (Hanssen, 2010: 523). But there was discrimination in Philadelphia, albeit entirely in MGM’s favor, and as a testament to the extraordinary popularity of its films. MGM’s nineteen films played a total of 289

Catherine Jurca Table 22.1  C  haracteristics of MGM, Paramount, and Warner Bros. films at the Boyd and Stanley theaters

MGM Paramount Warner Bros.

No. films

Days played

Avg. days per film

Revenue

Avg. revenue per film

Total revenue*

Revenue from Boyd/ Stanley (% of total)

19 20 16

208 134 127

11 7 8

$384,300 $152,400 $177,400

$20,200 $7,600 $11,100

$720,900 $316,300 $458,600

53 48 39

* Among all theaters in the sample.

208 days at the Boyd and Stanley, or on average eleven days per film; twelve of its nineteen films were held over, eight for an extra week or more (see Table 22.1). Warner Bros.’ sixteen films played 127 days at the Boyd and Stanley, for an average of eight days. Only four from Warners were held over, and only one as long as a week. Paramount fared even worse; its twenty films played 134 days at these theaters and averaged only seven days of playing time each, or the minimum standard booking. No films were held over. MGM films earned $384,300 at these two theaters, more than double Warners’ revenue ($177,400) and Paramount’s ($152,400). Philadelphia bears out MGM’s reputation as by far the most successful studio of the decade and indicates the extent to which its films helped to keep the entire system afloat. That is, the situation was less about equal treatment than about preeminence; Warners films (and those of the other companies) got out of MGM’s way. They were simply not attractive enough to occupy the city’s most valuable screen time longer than they did, which is another way of saying that it was not these theaters’ special task to subsidize the parent company’s productions at the expense of their own box office returns. First-run screenings were an important component of total film earnings. The Boyd and Stanley generated 53 percent of the total revenue of MGM’s nineteen films among the ­t wenty-three theaters in the sample, and 48 percent of Paramount’s earnings on its twenty films. Warners was the outlier: its Boyd and Stanley films earned only 39 percent of their total revenue from first run. This finding is unexpected. MGM’s share of first-run box office was self-evidently linked to its films’ popularity: they earned on average $20,200 at these theaters. Paramount’s was not; its films just did not perform well overall. Its Boyd and Stanley films averaged $7,600 each. Despite playing fewer films for fewer days at these theaters, Warners’ earned an average of $11,100 per picture. Several Paramount films played for as long as a week because it was not worth booting them out earlier. In a rationalized distribution system, the benefits of losing a poor film a few days early were less than keeping a known popular film much longer, in part because the vast majority of new films opened on Friday or Saturday at these theaters to capitalize on the novelty of anticipated films over the busy weekend. Paramount films did not perform well in second run either, earning just 18 percent of revenue there among the sample theaters. Percentages are somewhat skewed because Skouras Theaters, a Paramount affiliate, operated four theaters in the city; it was the only major company to compete in the subsequent-run market. Newspaper ads indicate that three of these theaters served as second-run theaters for Paramount films. But Warners had the option to run Paramount films in second-run, ahead of the Skouras theaters; it just did not always exercise it. Paramount films played at fewer Warners second-run theaters because Warners tended not to want them, further evidence of that studio’s decline during bankruptcy when, according to a 1937 Fortune article, “the once accurate name of Paramount [was] a symbol of all that was ludicrous, luckless, and unprofitable in the show world” (Paramount: 87). 290

Distribution and exhibition Table 22.2  Characteristics of MGM and Warner Bros. Boyd/Stanley films in second run (among ­sample theaters) No. Revenue No. Avg. days Avg. revenue Avg. days ( films not Avg. revenue ( films films (% of total) screenings per film per film held over at B/S) not held over at B/S) MGM 19 Warner 16 Bros.

23 35

43 53

15 20

$8,900 $9,900

6 17

$2,900 $8,300

The question of discrimination looks different within a metropolitan market, where one company owned lots of theaters. MGM earned 23 percent of its Boyd/Stanley films’ revenue in second run, with Warners bringing in 35 percent (see Table 22.2). Warners films earned such a high percentage in second run because they compensated here for the comparatively quick movement out of first run. That is, Warners did benefit itself, just further down the line; its sixteen films had fifty-three separate screenings in second run and averaged twenty days each. MGM’s nineteen films had forty-three separate screenings in second run and averaged fifteen days. While the most popular first-run films from MGM tended to have shorter, less lucrative second runs, especially downtown, possibly due to fears of market saturation, that could scarcely be said of films without extended first runs. The seven MGM films that were not held over at the Boyd and Stanley – in other words, films that did not prove very popular with audiences in first run – played only forty-four days in second run, or six days each. The twelve Warners films that were not held over screened 209 days in second run, for an average of seventeen days each. Earnings for these films in first run were virtually identical: Warners averaged $8,500 per film, and MGM $8,600. When Warners channeled its films quickly to second run, clearing the way for the most popular films from MGM (and the other studios) at the Boyd and Stanley, it strove to recoup revenue at the next opportunity. The nineteen Boyd/Stanley MGM films earned a total of $168,200 in second run, an average of $8,900 each, with the sixteen films from Warners generating $158,500, for an average of $9,900 each. The discrepancy is far greater for the films that were not held over. The twelve from Warners earned $8,300 per film on average, while the seven from MGM averaged just $2,900 per film. The disparity is less an indication of a difference in quality among the films than it is of a certain commitment to privileging Warners’ own films in second run, turning it into something like a quasi-extended first run by keeping films that were still relatively new widely available at theaters that charged less than the Boyd and Stanley. Downtown second-run theaters in particular, which ran individual newspaper ads to promote their films, were categorically set up to attract audiences who were looking to see a particular film early in its exhibition life while also making themselves attractive to people more interested in a trip to the movies at a reasonable cost. The stark differences between MGM and Warners flatten out in third and fourth run, where ten of twelve theaters changed programs three times a week or more, reminding us that theaters of the majors were often maws of exhibition too. They charged less than higher-order theaters, and average revenue per screening was significantly lower than in prior runs. By third run one sometimes finds films that did not open in first run; such films become an important feature in fourth-run programs. The larger volume of films and the smaller impact on total revenue made systematic access to product from a wide range of companies more important than privileging a handful of Warners films. 291

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There was another way that Warners favored its own products at a fifth downtown theater that screened new films. The Earle was a nationally renowned theater that each week paired live entertainment with a feature film. Fourteen of the forty-three films screened at the Earle across the sample, or about one-third, were from Warner Bros. Paramount came in second with seven, and MGM, RKO, Universal, Columbia, and Republic accounted for the rest. As the presence of a poverty-row studio like Republic should suggest, while the live acts at the Earle were first rate, the films were not. These films could not really stand alone as entertainment, and the vast majority bypassed second run and went straight to third- or even fourth-run theaters, where the demand for quantity was greatest. The share of the revenue (15 percent for Warners films) that live acts attracted was much higher than the quality of the films deserved. In other words, Warners took advantage of its position to prop up weaker product at the Earle. Interestingly, however, it did not ensure that its films were paired with the live acts most likely to turn out the largest audiences, such as comedian Eddie Cantor or Major Bowes Amateurs (from a popular radio show). Warners’ distribution of films to the Earle was routinized, not targeted; it conveniently added extra revenue to a slate of films that block booking helped to ensure returned a small but reliable profit to the company. The remaining first-run theaters, the Aldine and the Stanton, were significantly smaller than the Stanley and Boyd, at 1,418 and 1,486 seats, respectively. They had completely different profiles that managed audience expectations in a market where most of the top-flight films were absorbed by the larger Boyd and Stanley. The differences are reflected in the top ticket prices: 65 cents at the Aldine, Warners’ most expensive theater, and 50 cents at the Stanton. The Aldine focused on a classy product, at a classy price, which is to say, it delivered the productions of United Artists, a distribution company that specialized in b­ ig-budget, quality films from independent producers, to upmarket audiences. Of the twenty-two films it screened during the sample period, fourteen were from UA; these accounted for 81 ­percent of the Aldine’s total box office (by comparison, MGM accounted for only 40 percent of total box office at the Boyd and Stanley). All UA films played longer than a week; five were held over for three weeks, including four from the distributor’s top producer Samuel ­Goldwyn. The average run for all UA films was fifteen days, in part a function of the popularity of films such as These Three (1936) and Little Lord Fauntleroy (1936). Philadelphia was large enough to ensure extended runs for refined films at the city’s top ticket price, although only Goldwyn’s The Dark Angel (1935) really justified a third week. That is, in general the extent of hold overs was related to a scarcity of suitable films for this pricey theater rather than demand from audiences that they stay. For example, Amateur Gentleman (United Artists, 1936), the first film from Douglas Fairbanks, Jr.’s British production company, remained twelve days at the Aldine despite failing to surpass average weekly box office in its first week. Its unpopularity was evidenced by its trajectory thereafter: brief screenings at one third-run theater and two fourth runs. The Aldine turned to classy productions from other companies, such as I Dream Too Much (a musical starring Metropolitan Opera soprano Lily Pons from RKO, 1935) and Crime and Punishment (Columbia, 1935), but there weren’t enough of these either, and so the Aldine rounded out its schedule with a few films like If You Could Only Cook (Columbia, 1935). This comedy is best remembered as the film Columbia President Harry Cohn dishonestly marketed to British exhibitors as a Frank Capra Production, and there was a touch of dishonesty too in its appearance at the Aldine, and it played for only a week. It did, however, star Herbert Marshall, the British actor whose suave (some would say bland) sophistication served as a kind of shorthand for the theater the Aldine strived to be: he starred in three of its twenty-two films. In reality there were plenty of classy films 292

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from other studios, such as Anna Karenina and A Tale of Two Cities, but MGM films were too popular to downgrade to the smaller theater. The Aldine closed for the summer on June 20, the only theater in the sample to do so. No MGM, Paramount, or Warners films played at the Aldine, but they provided the bulk of films for the remaining theater. The Stanton did not play high-class or big-budget films but rather medium- and low-budget pictures that did not warrant screenings at the Boyd or Stanley. The Stanton specialized in crime dramas, filled out primarily with mysteries and horror films (Dracula’s Daughter [Universal, 1936] and Invisible Ray [Universal, 1936] from Universal, for example), fare that marked its target audience as quite different from the classy Aldine’s. It was really more of a 1.5-run house, its niche appeal representing a creative solution to the problem that by the mid-1930s, Hollywood studios made plenty of films with an eye to double features and block booking, films that were problematic as single features at top ticket prices, but that might still attract a loyal following. The occasionally troubled big-budget production also opened at the Stanton. Klondike Annie (Paramount, 1936), Mae West’s last film under her Paramount contract, faced terrible publicity on moral grounds (Curry, 1991); its relegation to the Stanton was a kind of penance in light of Philadelphia’s large Catholic population. West found her appropriate level amidst the gangsters and city boys, and the film played three weeks and was the Stanton’s most popular ($20,400). We might consider that Warners films hurried out of the Boyd and Stanley because, like Mae West, they didn’t quite belong there. Of the three studios for which production cost data are available, the MGM films that played there were, unsurprisingly, the most expensive to produce at $750,400 on average. RKO’s eleven films at the Boyd, Stanley, and Aldine averaged $517,900 each. Warners’ Boyd and Stanley films came in third at $492,600. Warners’ economy is legendary, and one way that it staved off the bankruptcy that plagued RKO and Paramount was by reducing production costs. Of all the first-run theaters in Philadelphia, the Stanton was especially appropriate for a Warners theater, not simply because it screened less expensive films, but because it was more or less the exhibition equivalent of the studio’s house style. Unlike MGM or Paramount or RKO, Warners had long cultivated a profile as a tough guy kind of place, with gritty, urban, male-oriented crime films that made James Cagney and Edward G. Robinson stars while promoting the studio’s trademark economy and efficiency (Sklar, 1992). Indeed, no film better highlights the difference in how Warners programmed theaters and where the company imagined its films fit than The Frisco Kid (1935). James Cagney played a sailor who rises to control San Francisco’s vice district, the Barbary Coast, in the ­m id-nineteenth century. Even though studios often embarked on similar projects simultaneously, the resemblance between this Warners film and Goldwyn’s Barbary Coast (1935), which was based on a best-selling history of the same name, is rather astonishing. Set in the same time and place, Edward G. Robinson played a saloon owner who likewise controls the infamous vice district. In both films journalists are killed for attempting to expose corruption, and the climaxes involve vigilantes determined to clean up the city. Cagney reforms through the love of a good woman and is spared; Robinson, who is responsible for several murders and is spurned by the woman he loves, is not. Goldwyn got his film out first; it played at the Aldine for three weeks beginning 10 October 1935 and earned $21,000 there and $42,800 at the sample theaters overall. Frisco Kid opened at the Stanton on ­Thanksgiving Day; it played sixteen days and earned $16,300, the theater’s second-highest gross and its top earning film across all runs at $32,500. The Boyd and Stanley also opened new films on Thanksgiving, both from MGM: Ah, Wilderness! (1935) and A Night at the Opera (1935). The Marx Brothers comedy earned $20,800 in nine days at the Stanley and ranked tenth 293

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in total earnings among all films in the sample. Ah, Wilderness! (MGM, 1935), based on a Eugene O’Neill play and starring Wallace Beery and Lionel Barrymore, only brought in $11,200 over eight days at the Boyd. Cagney was then Warners’ biggest star, ranked tenth in the ­Motion Picture Herald’s exhibitor poll of the Top Ten Money-Making Stars. The primary reason to favor the comparatively minor MGM film at the Boyd is that the Stanton was more of a Warners theater, and Cagney and Frisco Kid quintessential Warners properties. Of course, the Aldine was out of the question. The obvious differences between Frisco Kid and Barbary Coast are intrinsic to both the theaters that screened them and the companies that made them. Goldwyn spent money: on extravagant sets, screenwriters Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur, and stars Miriam Hopkins and Joel McCrea along with Robinson, on loan from Warners. Goldwyn also paid for the rights to the book to which Warners helped itself. Cagney had to settle for contract player Margaret Lindsay as the love interest in Frisco Kid. The films also dramatize their difference in neat ways. Robinson looks vaguely ridiculous in a puffy, ruffled shirt and earring, spouting “ain’t’s” to prove his lack of class, which is a central theme of the film and the reason Hopkins remains beyond his reach. He is an odd amalgam of gangster and pirate, rich but no gentleman. Robinson plays a Goldwyn film’s idea of an uncouth Warners character; only in this guise could he get to the Aldine. Frisco Kid, on the other hand, pooh-poohs the idea that Cagney is not good enough for Lindsay, even though she, unlike Hopkins, plays a proper lady. Cagney becomes the biggest man in town, but no puffy shirts for him. To be tough is not to be absurd, and she falls in love with him. Cagney gives himself up to the vigilantes but only because he realizes they have “right on their side.” Lindsay saves him from lynching by convincing the vigilantes that he acted “according to his own code, like a gentleman.” Thus is the Warners anti-hero a hero. Class is not a function of wealth or even of character but of a kind of integrity to one’s ideals; it means remaining true to yourself. Cagney would not be caught dead at the Aldine. This analysis of first-run theaters in Philadelphia should suggest that every exhibition situation was a local affair – even in the nation’s third largest city – determined by the configuration of theater ownership among different kinds and classes of theaters and companies. The story of Warners theaters in Philadelphia is a story of quantity, but it is also a story of quality, of the films that audiences liked best, the ones they did not turn out for, and how things like genre and studio impacted at what type of theater and for how long the type of audiences that theater attracted could view them. That hold overs were not always a measure of a film’s success is evidence both of the unpredictability of public taste but also the inherent messiness of a system that required not just an enormous quantity of films, but reliable access to plenty of the kind of high-quality films that gave audiences reason to believe that a trip to the movies would be worth the price of admission. Such films were not always available immediately, or in sufficient quantity, and these Warner Bros. theaters demonstrate the effort that went into managing product and audience expectations in a movie landscape characterized by uneven quality and demand.

References Balio, T. (1995) Grand Design: Hollywood as a Modern Business Enterprise, 1930–1939. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Curry, R. (1991) “Mae West as Censored Commodity: The Case of Klondike Annie.” Cinema Journal 31(1): 57–84. Gomery, D. (1986) The Hollywood Studio System. New York, NY: St. Martin’s Press. Hanssen, F.A. (2010) “Vertical Integration during the Hollywood Studio Era.” Journal of Law and Economics 53: 519–543.

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Distribution and exhibition Jurca, C. (2017) “The Congressional Battle over Motion Picture Distribution, 1936–1940.” In I. ­Morgan and P. Davies (eds.) Hollywood and the Great Depression: American Film, Politics and Society in the 1930s. Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh Press (pp. 86–102). “Paramount.” (1937) Fortune 15(3): 87–96, 194–198, 202–212. Sedgwick, J. and Pokorny, M. (1998) “The Risk Environment of Film Making: Warner Bros. in the Inter-War Years.” Journal of Economic History 35: 196–220. Sedgwick, J. and Pokorny, M. (2012) “Film Consumer Decision-Making: The Philadelphia Story, 1935–36.” Journal of Consumer Culture 12(3): 323–346. Sklar, R. (1992) City Boys: Cagney, Bogart, Garfield. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Smoodin, E. (2007) “Introduction: The History of Film History.” in E. Smoodin and J. Lewis (eds.) Looking Past the Screen: Case Studies in American Film History and Method. Durham, NC: Duke ­University Press (pp. 1–33).

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23 TO BE CONTINUED … Seriality, cyclicality, and the new cinema history Tim Snelson

In the introduction to Explorations in New Cinema History, Richard Maltby (2011) makes a distinction between film history – a history of films and their production – and new cinema history – an emergent interdisciplinary approach that considers the circulation and ­reception of cinema. This chapter argues that the theoretical frameworks associated with studying ­seriality and cyclicality allow historians to analyze the complex, at times contradictory ways in which films were conceived during their production, circulation and reception. By ­focusing on films not as individual creations or in terms of post hoc generic categories, but in terms of the repetitions of cyclical production trends and routine patterns of consumption, they become vital coordinates for mapping cinema’s commercial and social positioning within and across given historical periods. Taking an interdisciplinary approach, the chapter defines the key theoretical frameworks associated with seriality and cyclicality, drawing on the work of historians, sociologists, and business scholars, as well as film theorists. In order to demonstrate its intervention, this chapter draws upon a range of new work by cinema and media historians that is shaping this emerging field of study. Much of this work focuses on the production and (global) circulation of Hollywood film cycles and serials during the silent and classical eras (Barefoot, 2011, 2016; Canjels, 2011; Mayer, 2014; Snelson, 2015; Stanfield, 2013, 2015, 2016). As these varied studies and this chapter’s subsequent example of the “­jitterbug film” cycle demonstrates, Hollywood’s silent and classical periods have been much studied but often misunderstood in traditional film histories.

From genres to trends, cycles, and fads The first step is to define key terms. Most of the terminology employed in this chapter is derived, at least initially, from industrial rather than academic discourses, grounding the analyses in the ways that producers, distributors, and exhibitors conceptualized and discussed cinema within specific historical and institutional contexts. In his analysis of the relationships between cycles and genres during Hollywood’s silent and classical eras, Rick Altman (2004: 60–62) determines that studios are in the business of initiating cycles rather than establishing genres. He explains that once a new cycle has been initiated by a studio successfully bringing a “new type of material or approach [to an] already existing genre,” then, if these new features can be imitated and “conditions are favorable,” other studios will 296

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adopt the model and develop their own projects, including in their prestige productions. At this stage, cycles become industry-wide genres. He goes on to suggest that “once a genre is recognized and practiced throughout the industry, individual studios have no further economic interest in practicing it as such (particularly for prestige productions).” Studios will then typically abandon the model, restrict it to “B” productions, or handle it in a new way, thus instigating “a new round of genrification.” While genre is the dominant term employed in film studies to conceptualize and categorize films into types, it is not a term that Hollywood has historically used to discuss and understand its products. As Tino Balio (1993: 179) demonstrates, analysis of the trade press in the classical studio era highlights that producers, distributors, and exhibitors understood films in terms of “trends” and “cycles.” Production trends operated as broader, more enduring categories. Some, such as musicals and comedies, corresponded with the generic definitions we are familiar with but others, such as “prestige pictures,” the most popular and enduring trend of the studio era, were defined by production values and promotional strategies. Trends can then be broken down into component production cycles: in the 1930s, for example, cycles of all-star review, Broadway adaptation and backstage musicals peaked and waned across the decade, while cycles of fairy tale operettas and jitterbug pictures, discussed below, were more short-lived as they failed to connect fully with audiences (Balio: 214). As Balio explains, decisions about what types of films were produced were made in New York where the exhibition and distribution sectors of the business were headquartered rather than Hollywood where most films were produced. He explains, “the men (and they were all men) in charge of exhibition wielded enormous clout” since they were more sensitive to the fluctuating trends of exhibitors’ and audiences’ demands (Balio: 5). For Balio, Hollywood was in the business of responding to audiences’ desires for repetition rather than innovation. Peter Stanfield (2015: 10) complicates Balio’s distinctions in demonstrating that in film trade journals the terms “cycles,” “trends,” and “fads” were employed somewhat interchangeably to “suggest the transitory state of audience interests as well as shifts in film production.” Despite slippages in historical usage, these terminological distinctions can be usefully employed to define and measure distinct scales and time frames of stasis and change. Drawing on historical and literary theory and business scholarship, Stanfield has developed and empirically tested an increasingly nuanced theory of cyclical change which recognizes that film producers and exhibitors used cycles, however equivocally or intuitively, as a way of understanding, predicting, and managing change. Stanfield draws upon classic business cycle theory’s tripartite structure of fluctuations, cycles and trends, first popularized and developed by the American economist W.C. Mitchell (1874–1948), as a historically redolent model of forecasting change and regularity within economic systems. ­F luctuations, or fads, are ­“ localized, short-lived expressions of economic activity,” such as the a­ ttention-grabbing ­effect of a calculated hit like Gone with the Wind (Selznick/MGM, 1939), while cycles ­describe more general economic tendencies across a specific period. ­Stanfield argues that “the v­­ olatility of economic systems, of which fluctuations are a symptom, can be better ­understood – and hence, change can better be predicted – if a structure (i.e., the cycle) is used to identify the general characteristics of change” (Stanfield, 2015: 11). The trend, on the other hand, is characterized by “a monotonic movement, which is the result of the l­onger-run ­underlying forces that affect the series” of cycles, which are determined by ­“departures from [this] ­calculated trend line” (Bober, 1968: 45). For the cinema scholar, this tripartite structure of fads, cycles, and trends allows for a particularly responsive account of small but significant shifts across film production, distribution, and exhibition contexts. The prestige picture was already an established production 297

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trend before the 1930s and persisted as Hollywood’s principal economic and branding strategy across the studio era, but individual studios instigated and revived shorter term cycles of prestige pictures that peaked and waned across the period. This includes the revival of the prestige Western at the end of the 1930s when, as Balio (1993: 194) suggests, political and economic imperatives encouraged the majors to invest in big-budget Western films – an ever popular and reliable formula for the domestic market – because tensions in Europe had created anticipation of the closing of foreign markets and a concurrent “surge in Americanism across the country.” As Stanfield (2013: 18) argues, “tracking the dialectic between repetition and innovation across runs of films can make legible not only changes in their cinematic environments but also, to some degree, in the public sphere within which they were produced and consumed.” The potential to map the specificities, incongruities and shifting landscapes of media production and consumption against wider cultural trends make this a useful approach for new cinema history scholarship.

From textuality to seriality, cyclicality, and cross-mediality In his most recent research into the serial production of American biker movies from the mid-1960s and early-1970s, Stanfield (2016: 73–74) foregrounds “repetition” as this production cycle’s primary appeal to exhibitors and audiences. He reads this run of 45 films, which purposefully employed repetitive titles, promotion and plots, as symptomatic of a “mode of assembly, exhibition and consumption” that drives not just the exploitation sector, but filmmaking as an industrial art. The habitual youth audience’s demand for a familiar cinemagoing experience dictated a derivative product that could circulate through “an established pattern of screenings in urban neighborhood cinemas or in drive-in circuits that AIP had been using and had developed since the company’s inception” (Stanfield, 2016: 79). This rejection of principles of innovation and reversal of momentum through processes of production, circulation and reception, runs counter to the traditions of film studies, and, as a result, Stanfield looks to cross-media theories of seriality for frameworks that are attuned to his findings. Contemporary histories and theories of popular seriality have been pioneering, not only in rejecting the primacy of film texts – an intellectual move motivated, in part, by the limited preservation of film serials – but also in eschewing linear temporal sequencing of texts, processes, and events favored in much film history scholarship. Ruth Mayer (2014: 6–7) explains that, paradoxically, “the current serial turn … spatializes the temporal logic on which the notion of the series and the serial rely more immediately” by embracing serial culture’s “semantics of spread.” Her account of the spread of the Fu Manchu phenomenon across national and media contexts foregrounds its dialogical, self-generating “serial sprawl” rather than the individual agencies of authors or recipients. Her spatio-temporal lexicon is highly applicable to my analysis (Snelson, 2017) of swing music’s encroachment into cinema culture in the mid- to late 1930s, discussed below, but also intersects usefully with new cinema history’s priorities and methods. While recent studies of serial and series films identify specific narrative forms and their distinctions as their objects of study, they foreground contexts of distribution and exhibition over those of production (Barefoot, 2011, 2016; Canjels, 2011). The conventional distinction between serials and series is that serials have a plot which interconnects each episode, often employing cliff hanger endings, while a series, although it might contain the same cast, has no connecting plot across weekly episodes. In the 1930s, for example, Universal’s Flash Gordon chapter plays would constitute a serial while Disney’s Mickey Mouse shorts, based around discrete narratives, would constitute a series. There was no guarantee, however, that 298

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these films would be distributed or exhibited as intended. In the studio era, most innovation happened during the stages of distribution and exhibition, when serials would be packaged for different international and local markets. In the introduction to his monograph on the circulation of silent serials in Europe, Rudmer Canjels (2011: xvii) asserts that “even if the localized film serials had been abundantly preserved and could be analyzed, the distribution patterns would have remained a more important factor to research, as it was through distribution that the serial texts were constantly changed.” Correspondingly, Guy Barefoot (2016: 7) has mapped the international distribution of Hollywood serials, drawing upon American trade presses and studio records, revealing how “episodes could be combined or re-edited for different forms of exhibition” within different markets. In Trinidad in the 1940s, Hollywood serials such as Batman (Columbia, 1943) were reported to have been shown not in weekly episodes, but “all at once” to adult audiences with whom they were popular; while in Kingston, Jamaica in 1936, the twelve episode serial The Whispering Shadow (Mascot, 1933) was packaged into sets of three to six chapters playing in different cinemas, and not sequentially, across one week (5). Barefoot’s research highlights the primacy of exhibition in shaping the experience of film texts, with these West Indies markets redefining and even eliding the cliff hanger structures of these chapter plays in response to audience expectation and demand. These reorientations of “standardized” Hollywood products reveal much about the divergent cinema cultures of these countries. Barefoot (2011: 184) highlights the serial’s challenge to the “tendency to see film history as a history of films, and to see films as individual items with narratives that begin and end in the same sitting.” The sound serial’s reorientation of the relationship between texts and audiences is relevant to wider cinema culture in the period, however. Feature films also constituted just one, and not necessarily always the primary component of the cinema bill and, I would argue, were experienced and understood in relation to continuing trends in story types, themes and star combinations rather than as individual texts. In her oral history of 1930s cinemagoing in Britain, Annette Kuhn (2002: 58) records her surprise at the ­prominence – both in terms of quantity and quality – of memories of film serials by the interviewees who were children in this period of habitual cinemagoing. She explains that children were “just as likely to be exposed to feature films as serials in the matinees they went to,” but the serial narratives and cliff hanger endings of chapter plays feature far more prominently in their memories. In fact, some of the interviewees even misremember feature films as serials, or explicitly blur the distinctions between the two forms by comingling “Buck Rogers and, oh, old cowboy films” into the category of serials (Kuhn, 2002: 56). Kuhn (2002: 62) suggests that “memories of serials and suspense convey something of the structure of feeling of the compulsion to repeat this pleasurable but incomplete experience” of cinemagoing. Kuhn’s oral histories gathered from this 1930s generation of British cinemagoers reveals a clear disparity, in Raymond Williams’ terms (1961), between the “selective tradition” of film studies – based historically on the canonization of landmark feature films – and the “structure of feeling” of popular memory studies. This “collective imagination” of cinema as a shared sense of expectation and suspense amidst the cyclical consumption of interchangeable sci-fi serials and series westerns constitutes the “everyday magic” of Kuhn’s book title. Kuhn goes even further to suggest that these cinematic experiences of anticipation and repetition are conjoined with processes of child development. Cyclical processes of consumption of serial forms are imbricated with “struggles for collective and individual autonomy” in the “cliff hanger memories” of her interviewees (Kuhn, 2002: 62). Turning below to a cycle of late 1930s jitterbug pictures, the following section demonstrates how we might reorient, or at least supplement, dominant film histories by mapping 299

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the temporal and spatial coordinates of cross-media trends and cycles. Like Stanfield’s biker movies, the jitterbug films were produced and promoted as extensions of the consumption and exhibition environments in which they circulated. The identification of this run of films linked by stylistic, thematic, and topical components allowed me to trace back the steps of the jitterbug pictures to the wider consumption and exhibition trends from which they emerged. Feature films were the starting point rather than destination of my research journey.

The “swing boom” and the “jitterbug picture” cycle In order to explore the distinctions and intersections of the trends, cycles, series and serials I am analyzing, I need to provide some brief intellectual and historical context. Film historians assert that in 1934 Hollywood bowed to commercial and political pressures and shifted their production and exhibition strategies towards the “unified family audience” (Brown, 2013). With this shift, the assumption is that the interests of youth consumers were subsumed into family films featuring wholesome role models played by the likes of Judy Garland, Deanna Durbin, and Mickey Rooney (Nash, 2006; Scheiner, 2000). The problem with this model is that, as sociologies of cinemagoing and media reports of the time (Bahn, 1938; Thorp, 1939) highlighted, Hollywood’s family films and their adolescent stars were not especially popular with the habitually attending and spending youth market. As a media historian interested in youth – as a market, an audience, and a set of representational strategies – I was motivated to see what other films and media were being produced for youth and how they were received. This led me to a cycle of “jitterbug pictures” (­Schallert, 1938) beginning in 1938 and featuring leading swing bandleaders in their own star vehicles, playing opposite teenage ingénues (or at least female characters who were supposed to be in their teens). Analyzing reception discourses and representational tropes, I identified a corpus of films including Swing Sister Swing (Universal, 1938), Dancing Co-Ed (MGM, 1939), Some Like it Hot (Paramount, 1939), Naughty but Nice (Warner Bros., 1939), Sweet Heart of the Campus (Columbia, 1941), and Jukebox Jenny (Universal, 1942) as a distinct cross-studio cycle in Altman and Balio’s terms. In their reception across the trade and mainstream presses, these films were without exception dismissed as targeted deliberately at the “youthful trade” rather than for a general audience (Hannah, 1938: 13). This discourse is reproduced in more positive terms in studio marketing materials that stressed the specific youth address of the films and the personnel involved, including first time directors “who specialize in youth” (MGM., 1939), and that promoted tie-ins with youth fashion brands and contests based around ­jitterbug-like dances created for the films (Paramount, 1939; Universal, 1938). The discovery of this cycle led me to question why Hollywood was so explicitly producing content that was intended to appeal “so directly to jitterbugs” and that, as the Motion ­Picture Herald insisted, could therefore only be sold to “this uptodate [sic] type of young person” (W.R.W., 1938: 54). Using keyword searches of “swing” and “jitterbug” in key trade papers, I was able to situate this cycle within ongoing cinematic and cultural trends, tracking back to 1935 and 1937 when these terms – swing and jitterbug respectively – were first used, and then mapping their usage across the second half of the 1930s and into the 1940s. Using the Media History Digital Library (see Chapter 7) to search Variety, Film Daily, Motion Picture Herald, and Independent Exhibitors Film Bulletin for this period allowed me to cover discourses across and between production, distribution and exhibition sectors of the film business, as well as their intersection with wider media and cultural terrains through Variety’s broader entertainment remit. 300

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In late 1935, Variety introduced a “Swing Stuff” column in its Music section, reporting on the latest touring and recording bands, new “swing spots”, and the emergence of swing radio shows. The “Swing Stuff” column was an indicator of a wider cultural trend, as bandleaders like Benny Goodman brought swing music to a large national audience and popular media attention in the mid-1930s (Stowe, 1994: 8). From mid-1935, swing developed rapidly into a cross-media phenomenon or trend, moving out of dance halls and jazz clubs into cinema buildings, record shops and especially radio, the mass medium that tapped into the “swing boom” quicker than Hollywood. Radio broadcasting is usually understood as the instigator of the swing era, building popular momentum and media synergy through the serial form of weekly radio shows, such as CBS’s “Saturday Night Swing Club” (107). These nationally syndicated shows, broadcast live from ballrooms and theaters in big cities, fostered national audiences for touring and recording swing artists instigating the type of “spread” or “sprawl” that Mayer identifies (2014: 109). The perception in the mainstream press was that this wider cultural trend had turned the attention of youth cinema audiences onto big-name swing bands and away from Hollywood film content, relegating the latest “A” pictures to the status of mere support acts to “maestros” such as Goodman (Nugent, 1938). As a result, the trade press reported that “on the impetus of swing and their b.o. lure through radio build up [bandleaders] are the most sought after theatre attractions” across the country (Variety, 1938). As I have discussed elsewhere, this encouraged a number of first-run cinemas – both independent and affiliated – to revert to billing live bands alongside films, often as the headlining attraction, or to programming on-stage dance contests with films, offering contestants cash prizes, a chance to compete in state finals at flagship theaters, and even the opportunity to star in a Vitaphone short ­(Snelson, 2017). These changes in audience demand and exhibition practices highlight how a new cinema exhibition environment emerged and developed through complex hegemonic negotiations between supply and demand that was, mostly, beneficial for both exhibitors and audiences. The resulting power shift caused issues for the studio-affiliated exhibition chains: while the majors could make sure that their latest prestige films played in their cinemas first, large independents had as much access to the big bands as they did. In Hollywood, the studios’ initial response to the competition from radio and independent exhibitors was to incorporate the biggest swings stars into ongoing production trends of shorts and feature films. Vitaphone created an extremely popular Melody Masters series of short subject films featuring performances by swing bands, while Paramount’s ongoing series of Betty Boop cartoons incorporated topical material and, later in the decade, a new character called Sally Swing. From 1937, the major studios also started to invest heavily in the production of feature films. Warners were quickest off the mark, incorporating Benny Goodman into the in-production Hollywood Hotel (1937), while Paramount adapted some of its titles and promotion for current prestige projects (changing Panama Girl to Swing High, Swing Low, 1937, for example) and incorporated swing stars and music into its ongoing series of all-star musical revues (The Big Broadcast of 1938, 1938) and college comedies (College Swing, 1938). Paramount, in particular, invested heavily in the discourse of “swing” as a branding strategy to differentiate it from less “hip” studios apparently out of touch with youth sensibilities. An August 1937 house advert for the studio and its stars read: THEY WON’T DRAW FLIES! STARS? NAMES? Swell … but put them in outmoded vehicles, dated stories, problem pictures and THEY WON’T DRAW FLIES! THEY DON’T MEAN A THING IF THEY AIN’T GOT THAT SWING! The swing that Paramount’s got! Paramount SWING! (Variety, 1937) 301

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In Balio’s terms, we could see these strategies as the incorporation of topical material and discourses into continuing production trends of musicals, comedies, and prestige pictures. In 1938, however, Universal instigated a new cycle of “jitterbug pictures” by, in Altman’s terms, bringing “a new type of material or approach” to the musical comedy formula with Swing, Sister, Swing. MGM. and Paramount responded with Dancing Co-Ed, starring Artie Shaw, and Some Like It Hot, starring Gene Krupa, both hugely popular bandleaders in 1939. These films attempted to replicate the reoriented exhibition environment discussed above, by incorporating extended live music and dance sequences into the films and promoting ­opportunities for audiences to dance onstage and in the aisles. In so doing, Hollywood sought to incorporate the subcultural tactics of youth audiences and the improvisational strategies of entrepreneurial exhibitors, who were supplementing weak film bills with live bands and onstage dance contests. On the whole, however, the jitterbug films received poor critical and audience reception with neither exhibitors nor audiences persuaded that these films were a viable substitute for the live experience. As the Motion Picture Herald’s review of Some Like It Hot at the Paramount in Los Angeles reported, “audible reaction from the younger element present was to the effect that more hot music and less else would have been appreciated” (W.R.W., 1939: 17). While trade press adverts promised exhibitors that “­m illions of swing fans” would “stampede theatres” and have jitterbugs “dancing in the aisles!,” their relatively low box office and short runs suggested that they did not catch on with their target audiences (Film Daily, 1938, 1939). As with Stanfield’s biker films, repetition in the case of these jitterbug pictures must be understood not, as Altman suggests, as an attempt to reproduce the success of an innovative hit film – Swing Sister, Swing was not a box office success – but rather as an attempt to repackage a familiar experience in a reconsumable form. The identification of this run of films linked by stylistic, thematic, and topical components allowed me to trace back the steps of the jitterbug pictures to the wider consumption and exhibition contexts from which they emerged. In so doing, this revealed a great deal not only about wider cultural trends, but also about the complex contestations and intersections between media production, distribution, and exhibition sectors within the period I was analyzing. Reversing film studies’ usual trajectory through processes of production, circulation, and reception, these apparently inconsequential films – neither aesthetic nor commercial successes by usual standards – open up a counter-history that challenges the narratives of the rapid decline of live music and the shift to the “unified family audience” of American cinema culture in the 1930s. This brief example demonstrates the value of focusing on theories of seriality and cyclicality in exploring the complex relationships between the production and consumption of films, the broader cultural trends within which they are situated, and the public sphere in which they are circulated and contested.

Conclusion Discussing the disregard for the “everyday” in historical and philosophical enquiry, Henri Lefebvre (2000: 18) asserts that “the riddle of recurrence intercepts the theory of beginning.” It is these riddles of recurrence that scholars of film cycles and popular seriality seek to reinscribe within film history’s theory of beginning. Like new cinema history, our companion project seeks to understand cycles of cultural production within the context of the wider public sphere in which they circulate, and audiences’ experiences and understandings of them in relation to the rhythms and recurrences of their everyday lives. We share the 302

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assertion that the focus of cinema history should not be the production of individual films, but the diverse social experiences that they have provoked. Nevertheless, films – thought of in terms of runs and repetition rather that individuation and innovation – are the continuity that links these sites of social experience, even if they are experienced, understood and (mis) remembered in complex and contradictory ways. In rejecting general film histories as too broad in their reach and acknowledging case studies of individual cinemagoing experiences and exhibition sites as partial, this chapter has argued that film cycles provide an alternative area of investigation that is complex yet manageable enough to explore the interrelationships between processes of cultural production and consumption in necessary depth.

Acknowledgments A huge thanks to Richard Maltby and Peter Stanfield for their invaluable comments on an earlier draft.

References Altman, R. (2004) Film/Genre. London: British Film Institute Publishing. Bahn, C. (1938) “Statistics.” In J. Alicoate (ed.) The 1938 Film Daily Yearbook of Motion Pictures, New York, NY: Film Daily (pp. 37–39). Balio, T. (1993) Grand Design: Hollywood as a Modern Business Enterprise, 1930–1939. New York, NY: Scribner’s. Barefoot, G. (2011) “Who Watched that Masked Man? Hollywood’s Serial Audiences in the 1930s.” Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television 31(2): 167–190. Barefoot, G. (2016) “Big in Peru: Some Questions about the Hollywood Serial’s International Audience.” Unpublished paper, To Be Continued… Continued Symposium, University of Leicester. Bober, S. (1968) The Economics of Cycles and Growth. New York, NY: John Wiley & Sons. Brown, N. (2013) “‘A New Movie-Going Public’: 1930s Hollywood and the Emergence of the ­‘Family’ Film.” Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television 33(1): 1–23. Canjels, R. (2011) Distributing Silent Serials. Local Practices, Changing Forms, Cultural Transformation. New York, NY: Routledge. Film Daily (1938) “College Swing Advert.” 14 April, p. 8. Film Daily (1939) “Dancing Co-ed Advert.” 23 September, p. 3. Hanna (1938) “Notes about Films and Film People.” Independent Exhibitors Film Bulletin December, p. 13. Kuhn, A. (2002) An Everyday Magic: Cinema and Cultural Memory. London: I.B. Tauris. Lefebvre, H. (2000) Everyday Life in the Modern World. London: The Athlone Press. Maltby, R. (2011) “New Cinema Histories.” In R. Maltby, D. Biltereyst, and Ph. Meers (eds.) Explorations in New Cinema History: Approaches and Case Studies, Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell (pp. 3–31). Mayer, R. (2014) Serial Fu Manchu: The Chinese Supervillain and the Spread of Yellow Peril Ideology. ­Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press. MGM (1939) Dancing Co-Ed Pressbook. London: British Film Institute Library. Nash, I. (2006) American Sweethearts: Teenage Girls in Twentieth-Century Popular Culture. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Nugent, F. (1938) “Vendetta or a Clarinets Revenge.” New York Times 30 January, p. 155. Paramount (1939) Some Like It Hot (1939) Pressbook. London: British Film Institute Library. Schallert, E. (1938) “Swing Sister Swing New Jitterbug Effort.” Los Angeles Times 26 October, p. 15. Scheiner, G. (2000) Signifying Female Adolescence: Film Representations and Fans, 1920–1950. New York, NY: Praeger. Snelson, T. (2015) Phantom Ladies: Hollywood Horror and the Home Front. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Snelson, T. (2017) “‘They’ll Be Dancing in the Aisles!’: Youth Audiences, Cinema Exhibition and the Mid-Thirties’ Swing Boom.” Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television 37(3): 455–474 Stanfield, P. (2013) “‘Pix Biz Spurts with War Fever’: Film and the Public Sphere – Cycles and T ­ opicality.” Film History: An International Journal 25(1–2): 215–216.

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Tim Snelson Stanfield, P. (2015) The Cool and the Crazy: Pop Fifties Cinema. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers ­University Press. Stanfield, P. (2016) “Run, Angel, Run: Serial Production and the Biker Movie 1966–72.” In A. Fisher and J. Walker (eds.) Grindhouse: Cultural Exchange on 42nd Street, and Beyond. London: Bloomsbury Academic (pp. 73–91). Stowe, D. (1994) Swing Changes: Big Band Jazz in New Deal America. Cambridge, MA: Harvard U ­ niversity Press. Thorp, M. (1939) America at the Movies. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Universal (1938) “Swing Sister Swing (1938) Pressbook.” London: British Film Institute Library. Variety (1937) “Paramount House Advert.” 11 August, p. 16. Variety (1938) “Hey Hey Days for Name Bands.” 5 October, p. 1. Williams, R. (1961) The Long Revolution. London: Chatto and Windus. W.R.W. (1938) “Swing Sister Swing.” Motion Picture Herald 17 December, p. 51. W.R.W. (1939) “Some Like It Hot.” Motion Picture Herald 13 May, p. 40.

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24 KINO-BARONS AND NOBLE MINDS Specifics of film exhibition beyond commercial entertainment Lucie Česálková Nontheatrical cinema research seems to be caught in the trap of its own name. For a long time, it was too simply understood as “the other” – a deviation associated with noncommercial exhibition of non-Hollywood products mainly on sub-standard format (16 mm). However, as is evident from more detailed research, film circulation and consumption practices, film distribution policies and strategies in their true complexity rather defy the description in strict opposites. Various national contexts show, for different reasons, a variety of dynamic relationships between these areas. The convergence of two strong trends in contemporary film and media studies and the recognition of their mutual usefulness for understanding cinema history in its plasticity have contributed to a distortion of these long-traded ideas. Research into the new history of cinema is increasingly focused on the recognition of exhibition practices and film audiences out of the city centers – in rural areas and in small towns. Among other things, this allows us to recognize the importance of communities and other nontraditional actors engaged in exhibition, and their strategies in distorting standard exhibition practices (Aveyard, 2015; Thissen and Zimmerman, 2016). Useful cinema research, often undertaken in parallel with new cinema history but with another primary set of research questions, has explored the circulation of educational, industrial, advertising, scientific films, which cannot readily be examined in terms of popularity or profit, but which naturally put cinema within the wider frameworks of education, industry, business, and science (Hediger and Vonderau, 2009; Acland and Wasson, 2011; Florin, de Klerk, and Vonderau, 2016). A level of functional cooperation between these two areas of research has contributed well to our understanding of the deeper dynamics of relations between dominant and marginal forms of cinema, and between theatrical and nontheatrical exhibition in its political, economic, and sociocultural dimension. This will develop further once cooperation extends beyond the range of cinemas of Western countries, where relations between the commercial and noncommercial sectors of the economy have evolved in a way completely different from that in Eastern European countries. In this regard, Czechoslovakia shares a number of features typical of small cinema, but it is also a good example of the differences that arose in the specific political, economic and technological context of a Central European country in whose cultural and economic thinking the influences of East and West mixed. 305

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In public discourse on the role of cinema in Czech society during the 1910s and 1920s, one topic of continuous discussion concerned the earning power of movie theater operation. Domestic film production was relatively small until the end of the First World War; after 1918, without any state support, it amounted to no more than twenty films a year (Štábla, 1992). Both the industry and the public therefore associated cinema principally with the distribution and exhibition of foreign films. After 1912, these activities were legally considered part of the “productions of travelling bands of actors, tightrope walkers, gymnasts, musicians, etc.” (Hora, 1937: 2), marking cinema as being at some distance from the status of a respected form of cultural activity. As in other national contexts (e.g. Uricchio, 1990; Mühl-Benninghaus, 1997; Pearson and Uricchio, 1999; Grieveson, 2004; Kreimeier, 2005), considerations of the “morality of the cinema” were also prominent in this early period. Criticism of cinema entrepreneurs, of the hygienic state of their facilities and of film exhibition strategies that supported the deteriorating taste of the audience, converged around the concept of the “morality of the cinema.” Regulating the conditions for cinema operation and monitoring the contents of individual programs the government aimed to eliminate “brak” ( junk) and elevate the standard of cultural performances (Klimeš, 2006). One of the prominent participants of the debate, the Educational Association (Svaz osvětový) and its representatives such as Petr Zenkl (1912: 80), associated films with images of “murder, theft, burglary, seduction, the abduction and sale of young girls, intemperance, animal abuse, grotesque family scenes, and the pathetic and vulgar jokes of comedians.” The Association was established in 1905 by the Czech National Council (Národní rada česká), a political body which coordinated Czech interests within the Austro-Hungarian Empire, with the aim of promoting public education and creative cultural life in the Czech regions of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Members of the Association formed independent teacher’s associations and municipal educational boards and actively intervened in the regulation and censorship of culture, including cinema, proclaiming themselves defenders of the “morality of the cinema.” Since the film exhibition system was dependent on importing films from abroad, educators regarded cinema entrepreneurs as the key culprits responsible for the undesirable state that Zenkl so expressively described. According to the educators connected with the Association, the cinema entrepreneurs who helped to distribute trash were led by a single-minded pursuit of profit without regard for the general welfare. In the Czech environment, therefore, all manner of debates about the position of cinema as part of the political, economic, and sociocultural structure in the 1910s focused on the topic of cinema exhibition. The tendency to polarize the businessmen’s hunger for profit against the nobler interests of cultural and educational institutions had its roots in a more general disruption of conservative sociocultural values by the economic logic of industrial development in the Austro-Hungarian Empire at the beginning of the twentieth century, in which the Czech nobility, clergy, scientists, and intelligentsia were replaced in the role of elite by a petit bourgeoisie of factory owners, producers, and entrepreneurs (Svátek, 1995). As an exemplary modern phenomenon, cinema provided a highly visible frame of reference through which elements of the displaced elite could re-evaluate the meaning of cultural and economic capital. Emphasizing the extent to which the practices of cinema entrepreneurs were oriented toward commercial interests, the educators created the specific insult of “kino-baron” or “bio-baron,” likening them to mine owners (“coal barons”) (Klimeš, 2016: 144). Previous international studies have generally viewed early debates about the “morality of the cinema” as part of the effort by governments and civic organizations to control cinema, and therefore as the beginning of film censorship (e.g., Grieveson, 2004). Little attention, 306

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however, has been paid to the way in which educators’ calls for the gentrification of cinema also influenced the relationship between theatrical and nontheatrical modes of exhibition. This aspect is particularly important in an environment in which the film industry became entrenched more slowly than it did in the United States, France, or Germany (compare e.g. Balio, 1985; Hayward, 2004; Kapczynski-Richardson, 2012; Klimeš, 2016). As the Czechoslovak case indicates, cinemas with small national production industries and small markets are characterized by hybrid exhibition practices. In the 1920s, only the premiere cinemas in the larger cities of Prague and Brno operated on a daily basis, and even these venues did not serve the film industry exclusively. The various strategies used by Czech theatrical venues to balance commercial and noncommercial interests challenge traditional ideas about the role of nontheatrical exhibition within cinema’s infrastructure. Using an early study on The Informational Film by John Mercer, Anthony Slide (1992: x) ­defined nontheatrical film as a “term used to describe films not screened in commercial ­venues (i.e., theaters), but in homes, offices, libraries, institutions, and other non-theatrical sites.” Slide’s definition merged the mode of exhibition with the genre of educational, i­ndustrial, or sponsored films, which he presumed were “specifically produced for n ­ on-theatrical use, p­ rimarily to educate or inform audiences” (1992: xi). Over the last decade, Slide’s ­pioneering yet simplifying thesis has been overtaken by studies of “useful cinema.” These studies i­dentify variations in production, distribution, and exhibition practice from cinema’s ­primary ­purpose of providing commercial entertainment (Acland and Wasson, 2011), and we can productively consider the period discourse attacking kino-barons in the context provided by conclusions derived from case studies of useful cinema. Defenders of the morality of the cinema insisted that as a space of public entertainment the cinema must be protected against strictly commercial interests. Perceptions of the cinema from this perspective were shaped by contemporary concepts of public space and consumer culture, and these concepts are crucial to a delineation of the dynamic relationship between theatrical and nontheatrical exhibition. As an “alternative public sphere” that significantly transformed social space, broadened experiential horizons, and integrated itself within an emerging consumer culture (Hansen, 1991: 90–126), cinema was confronted with concerns about the vulgarization and commercialization of public spheres. In response to these concerns, exhibition practices emerged that provided alternatives to the dominant mode of theatrical/public/commercial exhibition, with each of these three terms offering a variation. Before the rise of television, the variant of theatrical/public/noncommercial exhibition occurred primarily in film screenings for schools, while theatrical/private/commercial exhibition involved closed screenings of erotic films (Brown, 2005) or medical films (in many cases with sexual themes), which were typically accessible only to men, or else to men and women in segregated audiences. Theatrical/private/noncommercial exhibition occurred most often through film clubs and film societies (Hagener, 2007; Gunning, 2014), which could also operate in nontheatrical venues as well. The broadest category of nontheatrical/public/noncommercial exhibition covered colonial film screenings (Grieveson and MacCabe, 2011; Fuhrmann, 2015), screenings in classrooms (Acland, 2011; Masson, 2012), museums (Wasson, 2005; Griffiths, 2008), libraries, churches (Lindvall, 2011), community houses, congresses, educational exhibitions (Bloom, 2008), industrial exhibitions and fairs (Loiperdinger, 2009; Michel, 2009), and conferences. Nontheatrical/public/commercial exhibition typically took place in multipurpose venues that were not explicitly theaters but occasionally offered film screenings as part of their cultural program. Nontheatrical/private/ noncommercial exhibition consisted of screenings in scientific laboratories (Cartwright, 1995), but more importantly amateur and home movies (Zimmermann, 1995). 307

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Even with this expanded categorization, it is necessary to bear in mind Haidee W ­ asson’s comment (2005: 37) that “the lines demarcating non-theatrical from theatrical have long been blurred.” Wasson (2005: 37) emphasizes the extent to which commercial film ­interests have maintained the demarcation between “the centre of moviegoing (commercial t­ heaters) and the putative margins that grew up around it (watching movies outside of movie t­ heaters).” She demonstrates that as early as the 1930s nontheatrical exhibition in the United States ­represented a significant part of the cinema exhibition infrastructure when measured by the number of venues and projectors in use (Wasson, 2013). This study will consider how these developments could differ in other contexts. ­Czechoslovakia is an example of a small national cinema that was slow to develop during the 1920s. It had a small film market and an underdeveloped infrastructure of cinemas. Its movie industry was characterized by close relations among its participants, and a relative lack of differentiation between their roles. In these conditions, no significant demand for the establishment of a distinctive parallel sphere of nontheatrical exhibition evolved, because governmental and legal support for cultural and educational interests and the mutual acquaintances within the film industry both favored the combination of activities rather than their separation. As a consequence, it was possible to align diverse interests in the spaces of cinemas which served a wider range of functions and catered not only to mass audiences, but also to smaller groups. Czechoslovak cinema policy of the 1920s was a product of the post-war situation. Addressing the issue of how to deal with a number of war invalids and facing the critique of immoral cinema entrepreneurship, the Czechoslovak government found a surprising solution in the compulsory redistribution of cinema licenses to war invalids and other humanitarian, educational, and nonprofit organizations. Although new actors and their interests entered the film exhibition business as a result, their influence over issues of censorship and taxation was only secondary. The Church’s position in Czech society had been significantly shaken by the fall of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and a strong anti-Catholic movement in the early 1920s ensured that the Church had no influence in the official debate. The Educational Association had one seat on the Film Censorship Board, along with eight government representatives. The new Film Censorship Board was created in 1919 under the supervision of the Ministry of Interior, as the question of film censorship was understood to be politically highly sensitive. Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, the Censorship Board’s policy remained highly protectionist, however, banning only eleven Czechoslovak productions in the two decades to 1939. German and American films were the most affected by censorship, but banned films made up less than 2 percent of the market. Instead, the Board focused on limiting access by age, and only half the films on the market were considered suitable for youth under sixteen years of age. If we compare the Czechoslovak example with the development in other larger film industries, we see that the manner in which modes of exhibition evolved in different ­political-economic and cultural contexts was influenced by three factors. The first of these was the influence of cultural, educational, or religious institutions and associations (libraries, museums, schools, YMCAs, Red Cross, church, etc.) which desired either to use film for their own purposes, to integrate it into their own practices, or to influence the methods of its regulation. The film industry’s negotiations with the state and with these institutions determined the operation of the entire cinematic infrastructure in individual national contexts (Grieveson, 2004), as well as the form of its internationalization. A second influential factor was the effect of changing concepts of public space and the governmental tendency to limit what should take place in it, most specifically in the emerging idea that culture 308

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might not be regulated but that access to it might be limited. While the discourse concerning accessibility usually applied explicitly only to children, notions of the sensitivity of other audience groups (most frequently women and uneducated citizens) to certain types of representations were implicit, giving rise to efforts to organize closed screenings of films for audiences defined by their gender, ethnicity, or class. The censorship practices and restrictions arising directly from this discourse also incited all manner of evasions of the rules it defined, from children’s tactics for sneaking into cinemas to screenings of forbidden films for closed societies (Kuhn, 1988; Rockett, 2000; Grieveson, 2001; Smith, 2005; Biltereyst and Vande Winkel, 2013). The third factor influencing the development of modes of exhibition was the economic situation and the expansion and accessibility of suitable film technology, particularly portable projectors (of, mostly, small gauge formats). One reason for the regulation of film exhibition space and for the implementation of security measures, which among other things led to the birth of standard movie palaces, was the danger of nitrate (flammable) film. Small gauge formats, by contrast, used nonflammable film stock, allowing films to be screened in these formats in noncertified venues for smaller audiences. In the centers of technological innovation and where the segment of independent associations and households had sufficient capital to adapt to new technology, the development of nontheatrical exhibition followed directly on the introduction of small gauge format. After 1923 other companies followed Eastman Kodak’s 16 mm Cine-Kodak: Victor Animatograph with Victor, Bell and Howell with Filmo, etc. (Fielding, 1967) and this format competed successfully with the French Pathé 9.5 mm (Schneider, 2007) in most Western European countries already in the 1920s. Wider adoption of these formats also significantly supported the birth of nontheatrical exhibition. This chapter now turns to discuss how institutions and associations, access and technology ­influenced the dynamics of the relationships between theatrical/nontheatrical, public/­ private, and commercial/noncommercial exhibition in Czechoslovakia in the first half of the twentieth century. My aim is to use the example of Czechoslovakia to indicate that these relationships may be more complicated than was the case in countries with more systematically functioning film industries because of the technological, economic, political, and sociocultural circumstances of a small nation with a small film market. These circumstances led to the creation of a unique cinematographic “ecology” with its own regulatory relationships. In Czechoslovakia’s case, nontheatrical exhibition did not for the most part evolve until the mid-1950s, but noncommercial practices more usually associated with nontheatrical exhibition were strongly entrenched as part of theatrical exhibition. The development of this model, its gradual transformation from the 1920s to the 1950s, and its outcomes will be examined in the remaining parts of this essay.

Cinema philanthropy: cultural and educational institutions vs. the movie theater Debates about the morality of the cinema in the Czech environment in the 1910s and 1920s influenced the establishment of censorship authorities, the rules of their work and the social understanding of cinema as a cultural institution within capitalist relationships and an evolving consumer culture. From the press of the period and from archival material documenting the communications between cultural and educational institutions and state administrative agencies (Skupa, 2009), it is clear that the images of cinema entrepreneurs as “kino-barons” and movie theaters as “gold mines” precisely caught the ideological orientation of the debates, which expressed skepticism and contempt for the mercantile tendencies 309

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in theater operation. Even the magazine published by the Association of Cinema Owners commented that The clever heads of the businessmen sniffed out a gold mine, the first production houses and movie theaters were established. People without artistic sensibility, speculators chasing new, easy, and exorbitant earnings, pounced on a new field uniting art and industry. (Hladík, 1919: 2) This situation was, however, understood as a past against which new practices were clearly distinguished. The accusation that the movie theater earned its money from the illiterate masses testified less to the reality of theater operations than to opinions about the place of commerce in culture. Although the Czech lands at the turn of the century were among the most industrially developed in the Austro-Hungarian empire (Rudolph, 1976: 39), the country’s overall economic situation was unsettled, lacking “anything resembling a great spurt or take-off in the one and a half decades before World War I” (Good, 1984: 83). The country’s delayed industrialization was echoed by the reticent development of capitalism, entrepreneurial culture, and economic thought. Czech theories of trade, markets, and consumption remained relatively conservative in the first two decades of the twentieth century, encouraging moderate development in accordance with public interest. In their efforts to elevate the social position of the entrepreneur, Czech economic theorists sought to compare them to artists, public servants, or even soldiers contributing to the general welfare of society (Gruber, 1919: 5), accompanying their arguments with appeals for moderate consumption and a moralizing approach to luxury (Bráf, 1913: 358). Economists attempted to explain the role of trade in the wider context of national development by pointing out the key role of the manufacturing classes and fulminating against the elitism of the intellectual castes (Bráf, 1923: 60–67). After Czech independence from Austria-Hungary in 1918, questions surfaced about the relationship between the national identity and the national economy, and the s­ ocioeconomic diagnosis of early post-war society became part of the defense of currency reforms by M ­ inister of Finance Alois Rašín. Rašín (1922: 146–147) considered it critical for the c­ ommercial ­development of the country that debates about excess profits and earning power be silenced, and he promoted the values of hard work and frugality undertaken for the ­benefit of the whole as the basis for future socioeconomic advancement. In accordance with these ideas, during the 1920s private business activities were always balanced with a concern for their alignment with “public interests.” It was in such an intellectual climate that amendments to Czech law and to the d­ istribution of movie theater licenses occurred in 1921. The economic potential of movie ­exhibition was constrained by the view that their profits should support the development of educational, humanitarian, and charitable institutions contributing to the common good. Rather than ­renewing existing theater owners’ operating licenses, the 1921 decree assigned them primarily to applicants who demonstrated that they were engaged in an edifying ­activity. This practice eliminated most private persons from theater operation, and redistributed ­existing ­businesses to sport, humanitarian, or educational associations (Klimeš, 1998; Skupa, 2009: 59). In the wake of the 1921 decree, the illegal practice of license subletting ­developed, in which many movie theaters were formally owned by associations, but in reality o ­ perated by private interests. As a further restriction on the commercial operation of movie t­ heaters, an entertainment tax directing a mandatory percentage of profits to the state was also ­imposed, accompanied by exemptions for so-called culturally educational programs. 310

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Although earlier historical studies have treated private business owners as key figures in Czech movie theater operation and recognized the practice of subletting licenses as a widespread phenomenon, archival research has demonstrated that the role of the associations was far more significant than has previously been acknowledged. Subletting licenses and subsequent commercial operation by private entrepreneurs was certainly the typical practice for premiere movie theaters in the center of large cities. In suburban environments and smaller towns, however, the interests and activities of licenser-associations significantly directed both the use and programming of movie theaters. As late as 1942, 57 percent of the facilities registered as movie theaters in Czechoslovakia held screenings only once or twice a week. Until after the end of the Second World War, only 18 percent operated every day; even then, most movie theaters held screenings three to six times per week (Havelka, 1946: 50). In the 1940s, 55 percent of all movie theaters in the country were operated by the Sokol sporting organization, 29 percent by private owners, 4 percent by the Catholic sporting organization Orel, and the remaining 12 percent, including the well-known People’s Theaters, by public administration, smaller sport collectives, Catholic groups, and other organizations (Havelka, 1946: 51). These figures suggest, among other things, the extent to which a wide range of events other than film screenings took place in locations officially registered, named, and considered as movie theaters. The majority of movie theaters – 69 percent – were owned by sporting organizations and functioned as multipurpose facilities, operating as gymnasia as well as hosting theatrical and marionette performances, tea parties, masquerades, carnivals, and harvest festivals (Červená, 2008). When they were used for film screenings, the theaters lacked elevation or fixed seats (Česálková, 2016). Theatrical film exhibitions in Sokol multipurpose venues were, however, decidedly not noncommercial. The association used box office income to finance other collective activities, including purchases, and repair of equipment. In years with good patronage the Sokol earmarked part of its revenues for the benefit of the local fire brigade or to support the families of Sokol members fallen in war (Česálková, 2016). Other influential associations shaping the field of cinema exhibition were Masaryk Educational Institute (MEI – a follower of the Educational Association) and Urania. MEI was the licensee of the luxury Passage premiere movie theater in Prague, designed for 780 spectators and featuring an Art Nouveau interior dominated by expansive arched ceilings (Figure 24.1). Although MEI ceded its commercial operation to Maxmilián Stanislav Kocka, the Institute also regularly held its own educational screenings of nonfiction films related to its program of lectures, and programmed and organized screenings for schools in Prague. This activity met the aims of all parties: MEI fulfilled its mission of spreading cultural and educational values, while movie theaters met their licensing requirement to organize cultural and educational screenings (Česálková, 2010). The Urania association undertook similar programs among Prague’s German community in the Urania theater (Havelka, 1967: 50). The low regard for the commercial motives of private theater operators combined with the existence of strongly developed collective organizations to give rise to specific strategies by which cultural and educational values were imposed on the operation of ordinary movie theaters in Czechoslovakia in the 1920s. Decrees governing theater ownership, entertainment taxes, operating conditions, and required programming for schools contributed to this situation. Whether the collectives used their ownership of the licenses to combine commercial theater operations with other community activities in suburban theaters or attempted to impose a cultural and educational program on the theaters, they did so as part of the theatrical mode of exhibition. Their exhibition practices, however, bore a close resemblance to the other community activities and cultural and educational performances they organized, 311

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Figure 24.1  C  inema Passage in Prague (courtesy Brother’s Čvančara Private Archive)

rather than to the film industry’s standards of theatrical commercial exhibition. In the legislative conditions of Czechoslovakia in the 1920s, cultural and educational collectives and their cultural practices were not a parasite on movie exhibition but a synergistic partner.

Immoral only in private: the politics of accessibility vs. the movie theater The educational institutions and other interest groups were successful in their long-term systematic effort to entrench legislative measures that complicated the strictly commercial operation of movie theaters. The resulting regulation of movie theater ownership went hand in hand with equally intensive efforts to regulate movie theater programs. Associations were actively engaged in the classification of films in the domestic market, and in searching for ideal films and ideal environments for their exhibition. These classifications were targeted mainly at educated audiences, and also aimed to cultivate the tastes of cinema owners. They were in the nature of nonbinding recommendations, and in many ways they added and deepened the work of Censorship Board. In histories of Czech film censorship, however, the strategies by which particular content was distributed to specific venues, and the hierarchies among public and semi-public venues, have so far received relatively little attention. Catalogues with lists of films and recommended settings for their exhibition often referred to morally conditioned ideas about what type of film corresponded to what type of exhibition context, and in a more general sense also presumed that the public sphere was separated into layers differentiated by who could access them and in what circumstances. In 1922 Marital Hygiene (Pan–Film, 1922), for example, an Austrian sexual education production, was approved by the Censorship Board and was soon advertised as a sensation by Prague movie theaters. Catholic, women’s, and other educational associations, however, categorized this film as suitable only for well instructed audiences, and thus for specialized medical screenings, and called for it to be banned for general public. At the request of these associations, the Censorship Board re-evaluated the film, resulting in a verdict that the film could be screened in regular theaters only if it was presented for male and female audiences separately, followed by a medical lecture, and if a birth scene was cut out. The lecture for women, moreover, had to be given by a female physician only, while the lecture for men was to be given by a male physician (Česálková, 2014: 204–205). Joseph von  Sternberg’s 312

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The Scarlett Empress (Paramount, 1934) with Marlene Dietrich, was approved by the C ­ ensorship Board in September 1935 as suitable for wide distribution with the access restricted to those older than sixteen. But it appeared in category D on the list of films published by Catholic League. The list was a tool by which Church tried to regulate moviegoing, tastes, and the discourse of moral public sphere; the D category identified forbidden films. Passionately held opinions about the accessibility of films played their role in early debates on morality in cinema and the battle over film censorship, which was often marked by acutely alarmist messages about the damage to viewers, especially children, caused by film screenings. The implementation of age categories for films did not silence these debates about accessibility. Instead, educational and Catholic collectives shifted their concerns to the project of categorizing films according to the ideal location and context of their viewing. In making determinations about what was unacceptable for theatrical and nontheatrical venues, the most important distinction was between unacceptable entertainment and unacceptable education. In Czechoslovakia in the 1920s, the most “acceptable” productions were categorized as cultural-educational films and exempted from entertainment taxes by official promulgation in 1928. Beyond this financial incentive, this categorization also propounded ideas about which films should be most accessible to Czech viewers. Cultural-educational films were primarily nonfiction travel, science, nature, historical, or artistic films; only a few features were included in the category, and without exception these were Czech productions specifically featuring attributes of Czech national culture, stories from Czech history, adaptations of Czech literary classics, or representations of Czech landscape. The category of the cultural-educational film reflected the idea that public space should be a site of officially declared national values, while alternative categories were relegated to a more restricted level of accessibility. Although this legislated vision of a cultivated public space was not in practice so rigidly enforced, its existence enables us to understand why accessibility in Czech exhibition was defined in part spatially and in part socially and politically. The distribution of Soviet films, avant-garde films, and sexual education films illustrates the system’s tendency not to ban problematic films, but to prescribe the conditions of their exhibition, principally through their relegation to spheres outside the dominant theatrical, public commercial mode of exhibition. As we have seen, in the case of sexual education films, their sensationalism and the delicacy of their subject matter was contained through gender-restricted accessibility and a lecture format – both nontheatrical and noncommercial practices – in the movie theater environment. Comparable preventive measures were also taken for politically problematic films. Screenings of Soviet films, which at the time were officially banned by the censor in connection with anti-Bolshevik police raids, were carried out in ordinary Prague theaters as “invitation only” events from the beginning of the 1920s (Cieslar, 1978; Štábla, 1992). These screenings were arranged by Proletkult, the cultural body of the Communist Party, which also managed a library of educational films from 1923 until it was disbanded at the end of the 1920s. Proletkult and other collectives often used less commercially attractive screening times such as Sunday mornings, or held late-night screenings in movie theaters and nontheatrical venues alike. Under similar conditions of invitation-only screenings or at inconvenient times, avant-garde films were exhibited by the club “Film-foto Levé fronty.” Between 1930 and 1934 the club rented one of the largest Prague movie theaters, the modern Metro (Figure 24.2), on Saturdays from 22:30 for screenings of film retrospectives, Soviet, and avant-garde films for members of the left-wing intelligentsia and workers (Štábla, 1987; Čvančara and Čvančara, 2011). These examples indicate that controlling programming in the public sphere did not necessarily mean moving “undesirable” content outside the theater, 313

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Figure 24.2  Cinema Metro in Prague (courtesy Brother’s Čvančara Private Archive)

but also included shifting screenings to less attractive times, demarcating accessibility not spatially through the distinction between theatrical and nontheatrical, but temporally.

Delayed technological equipment A key reason behind the extensive noncommercial exhibitions in movie theaters and the various strategies of limiting accessibility to film exhibition was the undeveloped network of nontheatrical venues, as a consequence of the unavailability of suitable equipment. While the network of public associations in Czechoslovakia was fairly extensive and managed in many respects to impose its interests, few of these institutions were sufficiently financially independent in the 1920s to acquire their own projectors. The Czechoslovak Society for Scientific Cinema lent out their 35 mm projector and venue to other associations, disseminated information concerning the benefits and drawbacks of various types of film equipment, and focused on developing public interest in amateur film (Česálková, 2008). Despite the economic crisis, the 1930s saw a growth in amateur filmmaking, following the marketing of the first Kodak 8 mm camera in 1932 (Děd, 1982: 160). In the same year Jindřich Suchánek introduced the first Czech-made devices for small gauge film: the Admira camera and the Popular projector, which could project 16 mm, 9.5 mm, and 8 mm formats as well as slides. Suchánek succeeded in rapidly establishing himself on the domestic market through his partnership with the influential Baťa factory and their activities in the field of advertising and school films (Szczepanik, 2009), as well through governmental protectionist policies favoring domestic brands, and his products became a national technological standard (Česálková, 2010). Small gauge film screenings grew slowly during the Second World War, from thirteen 16 mm venues in 1942 to 77 in 1945, but much more rapidly thereafter, with about 900 venues – as many as there were 35 mm theaters – by 1970. State socialism reinforced the established tradition of noncommercial usage of the public sphere, and a large network of ­ umber ­nontheatrical venues not considered official theaters developed during the 1950s. The n of registered projectors outside official movie theaters grew from 366 in 1952 to 12,412 in 1959, compared with the 2,567 theaters serving a total population of 8.6 ­m illion. The ­d ifference between theatrical and nontheatrical exhibition remained indistinct, ­however. A complete list of 16 mm films available for distribution in July 1954 listed over 800 fiction feature films, almost all of which were also presented in regular movie theaters. The list included a complete offering of Czech post-war production, some wartime and post-war French and Polish films and a wide spectrum of Soviet films. Many of the documentary, popular scientific, educational, instructional films, and cartoons included on this list were also screened in their 35 mm versions as part of theater programs. The 16 mm film format 314

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was, therefore, not exclusive to specific films and venues, but slowly extended its usability in circles that were not primarily bound to the film industry and as such were not subject to its key distribution strategies. Screenings took place in various cultural and educational facilities, but in the 1950s school film screenings were still far more frequently organized in movie theaters than in school classrooms. The principal reason for such a flexibly established relationship was the fact that the market was relatively small. After 1948, contact with western states was limited and movie theaters showed predominantly Czech and Soviet films (Skopal, 2014). In this centralized system, in which distribution operated in conjunction with domestic production under the command of approving authorities, any greater variation in exhibition practice was also ­prevented by the fact that all films produced in the mid-1950s were required to be suitable for the widest distribution possible, and films could be restricted to limited, specialized distribution if their final cut failed to meet the requirements imposed by the Dramaturgical Committee, an institution representing the ideas of Communist Party within Czechoslovak State Film (Česálková, 2014). Copying to the 16 mm format was common for all types of film, and was associated with the State’s vision of the widest application for all products and the idea of their mutually reinforcing economic and cultural/educational potential. The focal project of the 1950s became the so-called Folk University of Film (Filmová lidová univerzita), which built on the concept of the so-called Folk Universities and presented thematic seasons of popular scientific films, organized in partnership with high profile political institutions such as the Society for the Promulgation of Political Knowledge and the Union for Czechoslovak–Soviet Friendship.1 Despite their educational character, most of these screenings took place in ordinary movie theaters and were very popular in the period before television became widely available (Česálková and Váradi, 2015).

Conclusion Over the long term the state influenced the complex relationships between theatrical and nontheatrical space, commercial and noncommercial, and public and private exhibition in the Czech environment. State regulation of the free market and support for nonprofit institutions to operate as cinema entrepreneurs shaped Czech modes of exhibition after 1918, as did state coordination of a nationalized film industry perceived as a tool of both commerce and cultural policy after the Second World War. This chapter’s focus on the first half of the twentieth century has indicated that, in contrast to the patterns that existed in countries with a dominant commercial exhibition sector and an alternative nontheatrical sector, an entirely different situation existed in the cinemas of some small nations of what became the Soviet bloc, in which theatrical and nontheatrical exhibition could coexist in a balance of economic and cultural values, often undermining the strictly commercial operation of movie theaters. From the perspective of cinema history, research into the exhibition of films beyond the mode of generally commercial entertainment is useful in a number of respects. It points to an entirely different political landscape, which produced different policies for screening films from those typical in the commercial sphere. Not succumbing to the priorities of profit, these policies were defined by the often relatively conservative scheduling and organizational standards of non-film institutions, which were usually determined by the institutions’ cultural or educational character. In this environment, the distinctions between theatrical and nontheatrical modes of exhibition, between the uses of 16 mm and 35 mm film in distribution and exhibition, and between movie theaters nontheatrical venues were much more fluid. 315

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Note 1 Folk Universities were established in 1956 as a part of centralized public education. These institutions presented similar, centrally planned program of popular scientific or educational lectures throughout the country and soon became very popular among audiences.

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25 When the history of moviegoing is a history of movie watching, then what about the films? Frank Kessler and Sabine Lenk It’s always rather difficult to make a sweeping statement about the film field, for no one person may ever see it all. (Anon., 1915: 35) Serious students may find close to the surface of the movies, eloquent clues to the special hopes and dreams of the people for whom they were made. (Card, 1966: V)

In this chapter, we would like to address the question to what extent the new cinema history can benefit from looking at individual films, but also how a more film-centered approach can be enriched by integrating a perspective that takes into account its particular contexts of distribution, exhibition, and reception.1 After a brief look at Tom Gunning’s reflections on the role of individual films in film history, we will argue that every film is indeed a distinct product and thus can merit the cinema historian’s attention. We will look at three examples from the period before the First World War in order to explore in more detail how the focus on individual films can be made productive for a history of moviegoing, which, after all, is also a history of movie-watching. In all these cases, the issue of the films’ popularity and audience appeal – easily to establish in the first one, seemingly contested for the other two examples – will play a central role. So here we are not so much interested in the film as an aesthetic object (even though it can be important to consider it as such), but rather in the various documents that tell the story of when, where, and how it was seen.

Film history, cinema history, and the individual film When Gunning discussed the role of the individual film in relation to the writing of film history in 1990, his article “Film History and Film Analysis: The Individual Film in the Course of Time” tried first and foremost to build a bridge between the film theory debates (semi-­ otics, psychoanalysis, the so-called “apparatus theory”) that had dominated the field of cinema studies throughout the 1970s, and the “historical turn” of the 1980s, when early cinema, in particular, had started to become a major area of investigation for a young generation of 319

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film scholars. The central point he made was that the “analysis of the individual film provides a sort of laboratory for testing the relation between history and theory. It is at the level of the specific film that history and theory converge, setting up the terms of analysis” (Gunning, 1990a: 6). A quarter of a century later, this tension between theory and history seems deeply buried in the past, because film theory has somehow ceased to occupy center stage in scholarly engagement with the medium (Rodowick, 2014), whereas film historical research has moved into a variety of directions, ranging from David Bordwell’s historical poetics (1989: 369–398) to the new cinema history (Maltby, Biltereyst and Meers, 2011), from histories of specific stylistic features and cinematic devices to social, cultural, or economic histories of the various institutions involved in the production, distribution, and exhibition of films. Five years before Gunning’s essay was published, Robert C. Allen and Douglas Gomery had already famously declared in their landmark book Film History: Theory and Practice that for many research questions in film history there is no need to view or to analyze films: Films themselves will tell us next to nothing about modes of production, organisation structures, market situations, management decision making, or labour relations, just as close analysis of a bar of soap would reveal little data in the study of the personal hygiene industry, (Allen and Gomery, 1985: 39) a fact that is acknowledged also by Gunning (1990a: 6). While one can contest the analogy established here, it is quite clear that one aspect of this observation is indisputably justified: studying films will not help to provide answers to many of the questions that film historians address. Allen and Gomery’s statement encouraged the emergence of a field of research on the cultural and social significance of cinema as a form of entertainment, and cinemagoing as a form of social activity, which has defined itself as “cinema history” (or “new cinema history”). But rather than seeing “film history” as the history of films and “cinema history” as the history of moviegoing (to state things in a somewhat simplifying manner) as two separate entities, or worse, opposed areas of research, one should follow the lead of Richard Maltby, who presents both as complementary perspectives: New cinema history offers an account that complements and is informed by many aspects of film history, particularly by investigations of global conditions of production, of technical innovation and craft and of the multiple and interconnected organisational structures that characterise the film production industry. To these it adds knowledge of the historical operations of distribution and exhibition businesses worldwide, and of ways in which these interconnected networks of global corporate interests, local franchises and other small businesses have together managed the flow of cinema product around the world’s theatres and non-theatrical venues. (Maltby, 2011: 9) So cinema history and film history should be seen as a continuum rather than opposites, with a focus on the institutional aspects that shape the medium, rather than its development as an art form. Returning to Gunning’s text, we can see that what interests him is an interplay between film theory and film history that can inform the analysis of individual films and thereby both illustrate and elucidate the changing modes of film practice. It is not by accident that he draws upon examples such as Miriam Hansen’s analysis of Edwin S. Porter’s The Teddy Bears (1906) (Hansen, 1990: 50–71), or Lea Jacobs’ study on Josef von Sternberg’s Blonde Venus (Paramount, 1932) ( Jacobs, 1988: 21–31), as both authors aim to show how conflicting forces act upon the films in question and shape their textual form. As Gunning asserts, 320

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What they undertake is more than placing a text into an historical context. (…) An historical analysis of film reveals the complex transaction that takes place between text and context, so that one never simply functions as an allegory of the other, as too often happens in what passes for the social history of film. (Gunning, 1990a: 14) So Gunning, too, while staying on the textual side of the field, envisions a film historical practice that does not limit itself to the aesthetic dimension, but looks at the playing out of different modes of addressing the audience in the case of Hansen’s work on Porter’s film or, in Jacobs’ exploration of the production context of von Sternberg’s film, the continuous negotiation of censorship constraints. In these cases, the individual film thus functions as an exemplary instance that illuminates larger historical processes. One point, however, needs to be emphasized: looking at individual films does not in this case automatically mean conducting a formal or a textual analysis. The issue of the relevance of individual films for film history, and even more so for cinema history, reaches far beyond the filmic text. We might note that in both film and cinema history the emphasis often lies with fictional feature film, while other types of “cinema product” tend to be neglected. Another point to mention in passing is that the study of an individual print from the period can reveal information about production and postproduction procedures, the organization of labor during the production process, decisions concerning distribution practices, the cultural appropriation of a given film in a specific national, or even local context or censorship practices. What we have to leave out here is the perspective of the audiences. As we write about the early period, it is extremely rare to find sources documenting the experience of the ordinary cinemagoers. What can be retrieved are statements by writers, journalists, pedagogues, or other members of the so-called “literary intelligentsia,” who more often than not had a negative attitude towards the new medium and whose ideas are frequently verdicts rather than testimonies. There have, however, been a number of attempts to conceptualize spectatorship in the early period (see Kessler, 2010: 61–73).

Every film a distinctive product What distinguishes the film business from other industries is the fact that its product is supposed to be distinctive in every item – not every print, but every film – that is released. Formulaic genre films may resemble each other, but still they must differ sufficiently from each other to serve the producers’ and distributors’ interests and to satisfy audience demand for variation. The frequent practice of outright plagiarism in the early period (either by duping prints or through the exact reproduction of a well-known movie in the studio) bears witness to the importance accorded to at least some individual titles and to their recognized audience appeal. Exhibitors apparently wanted to show them because they knew of their success, and producers and distributors did not shy away from illegal practices in order to offer these films to their customers. The distinctiveness of individual titles is visible also on another level: not only are distribution catalogues organized by titles, but they often also distinguish clearly between major and minor productions, and between new titles and the backlist. This practice was continued throughout the studio era in the United States, providing prestige productions with a superior status through their marketing strategies and the extent to which they were advertised and promoted. The film offer was thus ranked by the producers and distributors, who decided how much they wanted to invest in marketing for different films and how they addressed their clients, the exhibitors. In parallel, critics ranked films in accordance with 321

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their own criteria, which were generally aesthetic ones. Further down the line, the box office results of individual films provided yet another form of ranking that mirrored audience preferences as well as the success of the marketing strategy. The criteria applied may have differed widely, depending on the interests of the groups involved. A film that scored high with the critics may have been of limited interest for the exhibitors. While the following quotation is from the 1960s, it perfectly illustrates the tension between critical appreciation and audience appeal that has existed since the beginnings of film reviewing in the 1910s. Needless to say, many artistically excellent films do not have a plot with sufficient mass appeal to be commercial hits in every – or even most – general situations in the country. These productions, if their themes are not too sordid, do lend sorely needed prestige to the industry, however. Despite the polls – which can only help – it still remains the exhibitor’s chore to book pictures which he believes will attract his patrons, whose likes and dislikes he makes it his business to fathom. The small-town theatre owner realizes that many of his films will never win a prize from the critics – who usually are more sophisticated than the average movie-goer – that all they will do is please his patrons. If he sees a picture that suits his customers, and it has earned a few citations which he can publicize, so much the better. (Anon., 1961: 4) The same may be said retrospectively and on a more general level about many of the films that have been canonized by film historians interested chiefly in aesthetic questions, a significant number of which may not have had “sufficient mass appeal to be commercial hits,” but did indeed “lend sorely needed prestige to the industry” (anon., 1961: 4). We argue, therefore, that in order to understand the distinctive value of a given film on the levels of production, distribution, exhibition, and reception, rather than doing a formal or a textual analysis, one would have to refer to paratextual sources and other documents to understand how producers, distributors, or exhibitors positioned that film in the market, how it was presented to the audience, how it was framed as a unique product and as the promise of a specific experience. Distribution catalogues, advertisements, handbills, posters, and other written sources are crucial in this kind of investigation. In what follows, we would like to discuss three cases that, in different ways, address the question of these films’ distinctive qualities. Our first case study concerns a production that became a huge commercial success and is still part of the international canon of cinematographic milestones and masterpieces.

Georges Méliès’s A Trip to the Moon: a canonical success film If one were to choose an image that epitomizes the first years of moving pictures, the most obvious candidate might be the rocket hitting the eye of the moon, which has, indeed, been abundantly used on book and DVD covers. The film in which it appears, Georges Méliès’s A Trip to the Moon (Voyage dans la lune, 1902), clearly belongs in the canon of film history. It is seen not only as an early example for the development towards longer narrative films, but also as a typical product of the so-called “cinema of attractions” (Gunning, 1990b: 56–62).2 More importantly, from the viewpoint of cinema history, it was a very successful film, widely distributed and shown over a relatively long period of time. According to Richard Abel (1999: 21), it was immensely popular in the United States. The fact that the film also 322

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circulated in numerous illegal dupe copies suggests that its commercial potential was acknowledged and exploited by Méliès’s competitors as well. As Abel observes, the film toured for at least another three years all through the United States, but was in fact most often presented as an Edison production (Abel, 2011: 138). In Berlin, according to the advertisements in the Berliner Zeitung, where it was announced under its German release title Die Reise zum Mond, it was screened throughout the month of January 1903 at the Wintergarten. Both the fact that it ran for several weeks and that its title was used in the advertisement indicate that the film was indeed seen as a special attraction.3 Another document bearing witness to the extraordinary success of A Trip to the Moon is a 1902 handbill of the Cirque Féerique Anderson, presenting the show’s program (reproduced in Malthête and Mannoni, 2002: 176). In the first part, there are various artists and performers: an aerialist, acrobats, clowns, etc. The show’s second half is opened by the magician Anderson himself, followed by musical acrobats, and then the film program consisting of five comedies (vues comiques) and A Trip to the Moon. Méliès’s film is presented as a “grande féerie en 30 tableaux” (thus as a “spectacular production”) based on Jules Verne’s novel. All thirty tableaux are listed with their title. All in all, the information about A Trip to the Moon takes up about one third of the surface of the handbill, so it appears as a major, if not the main attraction, more prominent in the publicity than Anderson’s act, which one would imagine was supposed to be the actual highpoint of the show. These sources all point into the same direction: A Trip to the Moon was apparently perceived as an exceptional production. It was shown in theaters for a long period of time and it successfully transgressed the norm that only short films were to be shown in variety theaters. It was advertised in ways that went far beyond the attention given to other films at the time, and its prestige seems to have been considerable. Even though, as Abel rightly observes, A Trip to the Moon cannot be said to have “single-handedly created a stable market for cinema exhibition and for the ‘staged’ story film” in the United States, it clearly did have a bigger impact than most other films (Abel, 1999: 21). It was popular with audiences, with the exhibitors, and even with Méliès’s competitors, who duped it. What made it so successful? There are several factors, which may have varied slightly from one country to the other. In France, for instance, the reference to Jules Verne may have played a certain role, even if, in spite of an identical title, its narrative bore absolutely no relation to Verne’s novel. Anderson’s reference to the féerie, a popular stage genre at the time, may also have added to its attraction and, in any event, provided a cultural frame of reference for French audiences. In the United States, on the other hand, the attribution of the film to the name of Edison may have added, to some extent at least, to its appeal. In order to be able to assess the significance of A Trip to the Moon for the international film market in 1902 and the following years, one could think of a comparative research pro­ ject involving scholars from different countries. A similar project has already been organized (Loiperdinger and Jung, 2013) to better understand what made Asta Nielsen an international star; a global project to retrieve documents on Méliès’s “blockbuster,” to some extent analogous to the one on Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy (New Line, 2001, 2002, 2003) initiated by Martin Barker and Ernest Mathijs (Barker and Mathijs, 2007; see also Thompson, 2007), would help us learn more about how the film was advertized, and also about early distribution networks (when, where, by whom was it screened), program structures (was it screened independently as in the Wintergarten, or else what place did it occupy in programs at different types of venues), about how long it was screened in the various venues and about later re-releases. Given the number of newspapers that by now have been digitized as well as other resources that have become available, such a project could indeed be organized. Bringing together data from many different countries, the extent of the film’s international distribution 323

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would be made visible, and documents providing information on audience appreciation would likely surface in the process. Even though A Trip to the Moon was undoubtedly an exceptional film at the time, an in-depth study of its distribution, exhibition, and reception could yield valuable insights into the landscape of moving pictures at the beginning of the twentieth century. More generally, the possibility of conducting comparative international studies of that kind opens new perspectives for cinema history. Our second case study concerns a film that was conceived as a kind of “cultural blockbuster” in 1913 and later marked down by film historians as a commercial flop and an example of a failed industry strategy to conquer new audiences.

Hit or miss? Atlantis (August Blom, Nordisk, 1913) The 1913 adaptation of German writer Gerhart Hauptmann’s novel Atlantis, produced by the Danish Nordisk Films Kompagni and directed by August Blom, was in many respects an exceptional enterprise. With its eight reels, “it was the longest Danish film to date and one of the ­longest made anywhere in the world” (Mottram, 1988: 156). Consequently, it was an immensely ambitious project, even – most unusually – being announced in the German press several months before the film was released, with reports of its production costing half a million marks (Göktürk, 1994: 73). The fact that the 1912 Nobel Prize Winner in Literature had agreed to a film adaptation of his novel, which had been published that same year, was in itself a remarkable feat and widely used in the film’s advertisements. In Germany, Atlantis was p­ romoted as a “Gerhart Hauptmann-Film,” despite the writer not being responsible for the script ­(Göktürk, 1994: 75). The sinking of the Titanic on 15 April 1912 gave the novel an unforeseeable topicality and the film a frame of reference for its most spectacular scene, the shipwreck of the steamer “Atlantis,” which added to its attraction and commercial value. According to ­Kinematograph and ­Lantern Weekly, each of the 15 copies circulating in Germany cost distributors 15,000 marks (anon., 1913: 159). In Germany, the film was linked to the Autorenfilm strategy, with film ­companies trying to secure the collaboration of famous writers and put well-known stage actors in front of the camera (Diederichs, 1990: 101–120; Quaresima, 1990: 101–120). In this respect, Atlantis was clearly a production aimed at lending “prestige to the industry,” (anon., 1961: 4) while at the same time hoping to attract large audiences because of Hauptmann’s reputation, the film’s enormous production values and its spectacular shipwreck scene. In film history, however, Atlantis is often recorded as an artistic as well as an economic failure. Leaving aside the former, which depends largely on the aesthetic criteria applied by historians, the latter point is worth exploring, because the film’s lack of success is considered to have had consequences. The French critic Maurice Drouzy speaks of a “failure not only on a financial level … but also on a psychological one.” According to him, clients from then on no longer bought films “with their eyes closed,” on the basis of Nordisk’s excellent reputation, as they had done before (Drouzy, 1989: 13–14, our translation). Göktürk calls Atlantis “a losing bargain” for Nordisk, because in most countries outside Germany it was much less popular (Göktürk, 1994: 81).4 Indeed, elsewhere the film was shown in often drastically shortened versions (Drouzy, 1989: 14; anon., 1913: 156). Atlantis was conceived by Nordisk as an early type of blockbuster, aimed at international distribution and intended to draw audiences through its combination of high cultural values, spectacular production values, and topical sensationalism. This account of its appeal to audiences, therefore, allows us to draw conclusions about the emergence of a more general film culture in the early 1910s. The search for contemporary sources undertaken by Helmut H. Diederichs (1986: 114, 165) reveals how the prejudice started, at least in Germany: it was launched by a group of 324

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Kinoreformer (cinema reformers) in 1913/1914, whose statements were uncritically repeated. The German Kinoreform movement (ca. 1907–1920) was an amalgamation of several interests, combining different social and political groups of intellectuals (teachers, clergymen, doctors, lawyers, etc.) with various motivations and aims. The “cultural pessimists” among them only saw cinema’s negative sides (moral corruption of the youth, misguiding of aesthetic taste, health hazards in the theaters); the “optimists” saw its potential (in particular as a new teaching tool). With respect to Atlantis and other art film productions, the Kinoreformer claimed, as Diederichs shows, that the elevated production costs did not lead to artistic achievements, nor did they generate sufficient additional revenues. Looking for similar documents in other countries may reveal other sources from which film historians have derived the prejudice about the “unfortunate” art film adventures of European film companies in the 1910s.5 Using newly available source material from Nordisk’s company archive, which has records going back to the early days of Ole Olsen’s activities in film business (the Danish production company has existed since 1906), the Danish researcher Isak Thorsen was able to prove that Atlantis was not a “losing bargain,” but on the contrary quite a commercial success for Nordisk. Despite the radical cuts in foreign distribution prints – from its original length of 2,280m to 1,500 m and even 628 m – which obviously had serious effects on the way the story was told, the film earned several times its production costs (Thorsen, 2018: 128–130). This indicates that audiences bought tickets to watch the film in substantial numbers. This example illustrates the importance of combining perspectives. Looking at Atlantis only from an aesthetic point of view, or from the discussions that the film triggered among the cultural elite and which have influenced the views of film historians, it is difficult to assess its importance – whether positive or negative – for Nordisk, and its popularity or lack thereof. Taking into consideration the company’s papers has allowed Thorsen to question the thesis of the film’s commercial failure and its lack of audience appeal. Studying contemporary and later documents can reveal to what extent they give convergent or divergent answers to the same questions such as financial success, aesthetic achievements, commercial innovation, as well as reception as far as relevant documents can be found.

Looking at stardom from another perspective: Sarah Bernhardt In our final example, we would like to move a step further and show how closely film history and cinema history can be interconnected thanks to the rapidly growing accessibility of paratextual source material, data and films themselves, as a result of the massive digitization efforts around the world in the past decade. In her study of the films of Sarah Bernhardt, Victoria Duckett (2015) states that traditional film history’s teleological point of view and its search for films showing cinematographic progress (in particular in editing and camera work) blocked the appreciation of Bernhardt’s films. They were considered “filmed theater” and interesting only as historical documents of the star’s acting on the stage. Her cinematographic work was seen as a simple extension of her theatrical activity, and she was accused of neither being able to understand the rules of the new technology nor cope with cinema’s potential. Unlike the circumstances in which Georges Sadoul and other historians wrote about her, today most of Bernhardt’s films are available and can be analyzed as a corpus. Duckett does this with fascinating results. Her contextualizing analysis of five of Bernhardt’s films reveals that in each case the actor used a different approach. In her chronological study she uncovers how the actress evolved in her cinematographic acting, how she adapted cultural elements she thought interesting for her public and how she used film’s potential in her  own  way. 325

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Duckett’s study demonstrates how concentrating on Bernhardt’s acting method, her influence on the mise-en-scène, her choice of dramas and roles, and the way she interpreted the characters, can also make us understand what these films reveal about film production, ci­nema audiences and critics between 1900 (Hamlet, Phono-Cinéma-Théâtre) and 1917 (­Mothers of France, Éclair) as well as what the actress achieved with her appearances in front of the camera. Duckett provides an example of what James Card (1966) had in mind for the “serious film student” in the epigraph to this chapter. Sarah Bernhardt’s underestimated film work provides a good example of why the ana­ lysis of a specific corpus of films can be of the highest interest today, not only in critically questioning a myth and appreciating an actress – once loved by millions of cinemagoers and praised as a film star by the high-brow (theater) critics – for what her work has actually meant for early cinema culture. The enormous volume of studies dedicated to Bernhardt could give the impression that there was nothing left to be said about her. Duckett’s painstaking analysis of the corpus of her films shows that this was not at all the case. As Duckett mentions in her book, a worldwide search for documents – again in a similar manner as Martin Loiperdinger and Uli Jung (2013) have undertaken in their systematic collection of documents on the international reception of Asta Nielsen – would reveal how Bernhardt’s films were received internationally, and open even more new perspectives.6 The example of Duckett’s study of Sarah Bernhardt is instructive on three levels at least: firstly, it shows that a combination of case studies and corpus analysis made possible by the digitization of films can yield new insights. Secondly, it demonstrates that an approach centered on the institution of cinema alone will miss important aspects, because moving images are always already part of a larger landscape of entertainment, which makes it necessary to look at the relations that film entertains with other media at a given historical moment, whether those be of the Magic Lantern culture and the broad range of stage performances for early cinema, or later of radio, television, or today’s computer games and YouTube clips. These relations play out not only on an aesthetic level, but also institutionally, culturally, and economically. Thirdly, Duckett makes use of hitherto unexplored archival documents such as posters, photos, film footage of Bernhardt’s private environment and others, in order to look at Bernhardt’s appearance in the films in the context of her public persona as well as her stage presence. This allows Duckett to show that Bernhardt in fact exercised a degree of artistic control over her screen image that was completely tailored for her audience, which she had come to know so well in her own theater and touring internationally.

Conclusion In our three case studies, we have addressed the issue of each films’ audience appeal, and how they could function as a gateway to a much larger study of their role in the cinematic landscape of their time, which is itself part of a much broader landscape of media and entertainment. We have suggested lines of research that combine an examination of programming strategies (using advertisements, program brochures, and handbills), distribution networks (analyzing advertisements in the local press or in trade journals), and presentation methods (by studying posters, flyers, photographs of entrances to cinema shows, etc.). It is not by accident that in all cases, we have invoked the possibilities of collaborative and comparative research, making use of the possibilities that are offered by the digital research environment. The various data collections and digitization initiatives all over the world allow us to bring together a broad range of perspectives. The availability, and even more importantly, the searchability of newspapers, trade journals, and collections of documents 326

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in digital form make it possible to link information from different types of source material, both in the form of close readings and through seeking patterns in a distant reading approach. The digital tools for searching, organizing, and visualizing data can help to develop new research questions and research agendas. The possibilities offered by these various tools will, we think, fundamentally change our way of doing historical research, perhaps in such a way that will result in there no longer being any difference between doing film history and doing cinema history. The outcry of the New York Dramatic Mirror’s anonymous critic in 1915 that there were too many films circulating so that it was impossible for him to see them all and “make a sweeping statement about the film field” (anon., 1915: 35) should not keep us from looking for specific cases that will help us to better understand early films themselves, and their role in the history of moviegoing, movie watching, and movie appreciation, especially now that there are so many of them available again in a digital form.

Notes 1 This chapter builds upon our lecture at the 2015 HoMER conference in Glasgow entitled “The Individual Film in Cinema History: Does It Matter?” and on ideas we sketched out in Kessler and Lenk (2015: 127–136). 2 For a discussion of the relationship between attraction and narration in A Trip to the Moon, see Kessler (2011: 115–128). 3 Given the fact that this kind of production was often shown during the holidays, it is quite probable that the film’s run in Berlin started even earlier, presumably around Christmas. However, we were unable to consult the issues of December 1902 of the Berliner Zeitung, so we cannot confirm this hypothesis. 4 See also Thorsen (2017: 128–130) for other authors claiming that Atlantis was a commercial ­failure. Quaresima (1990: 108) states, however, that at least in Berlin, the film must have been quite a success, quoting an article in Lichtbild-Bühne mentioning cinemas with more than 1,000 seats being sold out. 5 The French journal 1895 dedicated its issue no. 56 (2008) to “Le Film d’art et les films d’art en ­Europe, 1908–1911,” edited by Alain Carou and Béatrice de Pastre. The articles collected here ­offer a multi-perspectival look at the phenomenon, even though the individual authors rarely combine approaches. Still, using source material that had not been explored before, the issue ­succeeds in shedding new light on the French company Le Film d’Art and the films they produced. 6 See Loiperdinger and Jung (2013) and the Importing Asta Nielsen Database (http://importing-­a stanielsen.deutsches-filminstitut.de/ [Accessed 29 November 2018]).

References Abel, R. (1999) The Red Rooster Scare. Making Cinema American, 1900–1910. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Abel, R. (2011) “A Trip to the Moon as an American Phenomenon.” In M. Solomon (ed.) Fantastic ­Voyages of the Cinematic Imagination. Georges Méliès’s Trip to the Moon. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press (pp. 129–142). Allen, R.C. and Gomery, D. (1985) Film History. Theory and Practice. New York, NY: Knopf. Anon. (1913) The Kinematograph and Lantern Weekly, 21 August, 1767. Quoted in R. Mottram (1988) The Danish Cinema Before Dreyer. Metuchen, NJ: The Scarecrow Press. Anon. (1915) “Reviews of Feature Films.” The New York Dramatic Mirror, 73(1893), 31 March, 35. Quoted in G.C. Pratt (1966) Spellbound in Darkness. Readings in the History & Criticism of the Silent Film, Volume 1. Rochester, NY: The University of Rochester (p. V). Anon. (1961) “Exhibitors Study the 1960 Favorites of the Critics.” Harrisons’s Report, XLIII(1), 7 January, 1, 4. Barker, M. and Mathijs, E. (eds.) (2007) Watching The Lord of the Rings: Tolkien’s World Audiences. New York, NY: Peter Lang.

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Frank Kessler and Sabine Lenk Bordwell, D. (1989) “Historical Poetics of Cinema.” In R. Barton Palmer (ed.) The Cinematic Text: Methods and Approaches. New York, NY: AMS (pp. 369–398). Card, J. (1966) “The Silent Drama, 1915–1928.” Lecture at the George Eastman House, 1952, quoted in G.C. Pratt (1966) Spellbound in Darkness. Readings in the History & Criticism of the Silent Film, ­Volume 1. Rochester, NY: The University of Rochester (p. V). Carou, A. and De Pastre, B. (eds.) (2008) Le Film d’art et les films d’art en Europe, 1908–1911. Special issue of 1895, p. 56. Diederichs, H. H. (1986) Anfänge deutscher Filmkritik. Stuttgart: Fischer + Wiedleroither. Diederichs, H. H. (1990) “The Origins of the Autorenfilm.” In P. Cherchi Usai and L. Codelli (eds.) Prima di Caligari. Cinema Tedesco, 1895–1920. Pordenone: Edizioni Biblioteca dell’Immagine (pp. 380–400). Drouzy, M. (1989) “Le cinéma muet.” In J.-L. Passek (ed.), Le cinéma danois. Paris: Centre National d’art et de culture Georges Pompidou (pp. 11–16). Duckett, V. (2015) Seeing Sarah Bernhardt. Performance and Silent Film. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press. Göktürk, D. (1994) “Atlantis oder: vom Sinken der Kultur.” In M. Behn (ed.), Schwarzer Traum und weiße Sklavin. Deutsch-dänische Filmbeziehungen 1910–1930. München: Edition Text + Kritik (pp. 73–86). Gunning, T. (1990a) “Film History and Film Analysis: The Individual Film in the Course of Time.” Wide Angle 12(3): 4–19. Gunning, T. (1990b) “The Cinema of Attractions: Early Film, Its Spectator and the Avant-Garde.” In Th. Elsaesser (ed.) Early Cinema: Space, Frame, Narrative. London: British Film Institute (pp. 56–62). Hansen, M. (1990) “Adventures of Goldilocks: Spectatorship, Consumerism and Public Life.” camera obscura 8(1): 50–71. Jacobs, J. (1988) “The Censorship of ‘Blonde Venus’: Textual Analysis and Historical Method.” Cinema Journal 27(3): 21–31. Kessler, F. (2010) “Viewing Pleasures, Pleasuring Views: Forms of Spectatorship in Early Cinema.” In I. Schenk, M. Tröhler, and Y. Zimmermann (eds.) Film – Kino – Zuschauer: Filmrezeption. Marburg: Schüren (pp. 61–73). Kessler, F. (2011) “A Trip to the Moon as Féerie.” In M. Solomon (ed.) Fantastic Voyages of the Cinematic Imagination. Georges Méliès’s Trip to the Moon. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press (pp. 115–128). Kessler, F. and Lenk, S. (2015) “Quelles perspectives pour l’historiographie du cinéma?” In A. ­Beltrame, G. Fidotta, and A. Mariani (eds.), At the Borders of (Film) History. Udine: Forum, 2015 (pp. 127–136). Loiperdinger, M. and Jung, U. (eds.) (2013) Importing Asta Nielsen. The International Film Star in the Making 1910–1914. New Barnett: John Libbey Publishing. Maltby, R. (2011) “New Cinema Histories.” In R. Maltby, D. Biltereyst, and Ph. Meers (eds.) Explorations in New Cinema History. Approaches and Case Studies. Oxford, Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell (pp. 1–40). Maltby, R., Biltereyst, D., and Meers, Ph. (eds.) (2011) Explorations in New Cinema History. Approaches and Case Studies. Oxford, Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell. Malthête, J. and Mannoni, L. (2002) Méliès. Magie et Cinéma. Paris: Paris-Musées. Mottram, R. (1988) The Danish Cinema Before Dreyer. Metuchen, NJ, London: The Scarecrow Press. Pratt, G. C. (1966) Spellbound in Darkness. Readings in the History & Criticism of the Silent Film, Volume 1. Rochester, NY: The University of Rochester. Quaresima, L. (1990) “Dichter heraus! The Autorenfilm and German Cinema of the 1910s.” Griffithiana 38–39: 101–120. Rodowick, D. (2014) Elegy for Theory, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Thompson, K. (2007) The Frodo Franchise. The Lord of the Rings and Modern Hollywood. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Thorsen, I. (2018) Nordisk Films Compagni, 1906–1924: The Rise and Fall of the Polar Bear. (KINtop Studies in Early Cinema5). New Barnet: John Libbey.

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26 The evergreens and mayflies of film history The age distribution of films in exhibition Karel Dibbets This study deals with the afterlife of movies in the underworld of film culture. Its aim is to shed new light on the fate of outmoded films that haunted cinemas in the 1920s and 1930s like the unquiet souls of the dead in search of a place to rest. As new cinema history seeks to develop an ever more complete understanding of the experience of cinema across the ­t wentieth century, I will show in this chapter that old pictures used to have a substantial presence in movie theaters, not necessarily as the main feature, but still in competition with the steady supply of new films. Their numbers are buried in the long tail of demand curves where the dust of the market has gathered. Unlike most of the other decaying prints in the vaults, these vintage films had the power to survive and come back again and again. A lengthy track record became their most prominent feature. Movies travel through time. A film starts to lose its freshness and novelty value very soon in its first season. In the next season, if it ever returns, the film becomes more outdated, drawing fewer visitors, generating less revenue, obstructing the release of new productions. The majority of films disappear completely from the market within two or three years of their release. They will never come of age, remaining forever young and pristine as they sink into oblivion. Such is the fate of most films in history. They come and they go in great numbers. There are, however, exceptions. Some films are able to escape the path of extinction by building a reputation over time. They develop an extensive biography as they grow older and older, and like evergreens in popular music they even cultivate a special kind of attraction and popularity by creating shared memories among generations of moviegoers. Together they take up a considerable part of screen time every year, adding variation and continuity to film culture in general. Many cinemas had no scruples about showing movies five years after their release and some did so frequently. Youth matinees in particular were packed with old-timers. Silent films remained on the program even after the introduction of talking pictures: not only obsolete westerns with matinee heroes like Tom Mix or Fred Thompson, but also melodramas with Jean Forest, Jacky Coogan and other child actors. Moreover, a number of silent movies like Ben-Hur (MGM, 1925) began a second life after 1930 with a new sound track attached. Traditional media possessed of more self-esteem had learned long ago to be proud of its own history. Critics of literature, theater, art and architecture have always cherished the 329

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great works of antiquity. Old movies, however, received no respect or appreciation before the 1930s. Instead, they were inserted discreetly, like stowaways, into the general flow of new product. The first film classics were still waiting for recognition. A canon of major achievements did not yet exist. The coexistence of old and new films has never been studied in great detail, but the ­phenomenon has attracted some attention recently. Eric Hoyt (2014) and Brian Hannan (2016) approach the issue from the perspective of the Hollywood studios, which tried early on to create a market for the obsolescent pictures in their vaults. Analysts of moviegoing in the Netherlands have observed that during the 1930s “there was a very large number of films of various vintages doing hardly any business … such poorly performing films formed a kind of product debris not present in British markets” (Sedgwick, Pafort-Overduin, and Boter, 2012: 19). Although the negative connotation of debris is not much of a recommendation for further research, a cache of data will allow for a closer examination of the issue. In the following pages, I focus on the role and the dynamics of old films in exhibition and distribution in the Netherlands before 1940. I will present my argument in four steps, supported by a lot of data and a few examples. First, I want to examine the changing mix of old and new films in the cinemas over the years. The age distribution of films in exhibition, a telling phenomenon of moviegoing history, is the central concept of this discussion. Second, I will be focusing on the films with the longest track record, which I am calling the evergreens. I will discuss these old films, their lifespan and their unique biography. Third, it is instructive to contrast the evergreens with what I call the mayfly films, poorly performing movies with a very short lifespan. While old movies predictably do not get many screenings per year, I will show that numerous new films do not fare any better. Finally, I will explore the changing propensity of cinemas to exhibit old films over time. It is, however, important to clarify some concepts first.

Measuring performance In this study, old films are films with an exhibition history, a lengthy track record, an extended run time of at least four years. Run time is the period during which a film is circulating in the cinemas of a specific region or a country. I can calculate the lifespan, or absolute age, of a film by counting the number of weeks or years it remains in circulation: this is the length of time that the film is on display in a country between its first release and its last screening. A film’s relative age, which I discuss in relation to Figure 26.2, is the length of time between its first screening and a reference year: a film first screened in 1923 would have a relative age of twelve years in 1935 and fifteen years in 1938, but if its last screening occurred in 1940, its absolute age would be fixed at seventeen years. I identify a film as “new” or “recent” when its first release in the Netherlands has occurred within the previous three years. A period of three years covers two seasons of active circulation, which was not an uncommon practice in the 1930s. The vast majority of films will vanish from the market within three years, leaving us with a small category of diehards and survivors, the group receiving our attention here. Among these are the evergreens, the movies that never seem to disappear completely from public view over the years. In the absence of box office and attendance data, screen time presents itself as a viable ­concept to quantify and compare the performance of films in cinemas. Screen time refers here to the number of weeks that a movie is actually shown in one or more venues, whether in succession or simultaneously. A film can accumulate many playweeks during its entire lifespan, or just a few. Likewise, the same film can generate several playweeks in a single week 330

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when it is exhibited in more than one cinema during that week. Screen time is, therefore, not to be confused with the linear chronology of run time, for it includes simultaneous screenings as well.1 This study will use the number of playweeks as a measure of a film’s performance, success, and popularity. This approach is much indebted to a method deve­ loped by John Sedgwick (2000), the POPSTAT Index of film popularity, which uses a more elaborate set of factors. Evergreens are films with an extended lifespan of many years and an accumulated screen time of numerous playweeks. In this study the minimum lifespan is set at fifteen years and the minimum screen time at twenty playweeks. Evergreens are not necessarily the same as “classics,” films with a long-standing reputation, a quality which is often missing in the evergreens under review. These films usually do not figure in any canon of established works either. A film or cinema program refers to the contents of a show in a public venue on a specific date, listing a series of performances, including films and live acts. A program can also be a rich source of transactional information as it links bookings, sales and viewings to the same event. It is preceded by a booking at a film distributor and leads to the sale of an admission ticket resulting in a viewing experience by a visitor. The mixture of old and new films – their age distribution – can become a typical f­eature of a cinema’s program profile or style. Such a profile is defined to a large extent by the films in exhibition and more particularly by their genre, country of origin, release year, censorship rating, and age. A cinema cultivates a program profile of its own that reflects its preferences for certain films. Lies Van de Vijver (2012) has developed a preliminary typology of program profiles based on the peculiar composition of these features for the city of Ghent in Belgium. A penchant for old movies may typify a cinema’s profile. This approach can be expanded in two directions. Whereas you can classify individual cinemas on a micro level in this way, the same can be done on a macro level for the cinema industry as a whole. In addition, since the program profile of a movie theater may change, it is essential to include a time frame in the analysis. A profile will probably show more stability in the long run; an abrupt change would require an explanation. A repertoire is a list of all unique films shown at one or more venues during a certain period of time. For instance, the repertoire of the Tuschinski Theater in Amsterdam consisted of 44 feature films in 1928. All Amsterdam cinemas combined ran a repertoire of 592 movies in the same year. Some titles were new, some were old. Some cinemas shared a repertoire; others did not. Comparing and analyzing film repertoires increases our understanding of audience preferences and marketing practices in the past. In marketing analysis, the product life cycle is a concept used to map the lifespan of a product. It describes the stages a product goes through from its introduction and growth to its maturity and decline. It is not my intention to study all these stages, but it is worth noting that while most historians prefer to examine the first stage almost exclusively, this study focuses on the last stage. Moreover, the product life cycle of a film has changed, since the 1950s with television and again since the 1980s with videorecorders. A film today may play not only in a cinema but also on television, DVD, streaming video, etc. Watching old movies is no longer a curiosity or a privilege; they can be viewed almost everywhere and at any moment of the day. A film’s life cycle may never come to an end anymore. This prospect offers another spur to revisit the past when a film’s life cycle was very limited. Tracking old movies in exhibition requires collecting a huge amount of historical information. It is possible to reconstruct the exhibition history and the dissemination of films by recording where and when they have been shown. This study will make use of Cinema Context, the online database for the history of film culture in the Netherlands. Cinema 331

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Context provides a flood of information about the who, what, where, and when of film exhibition and distribution in the past (Dibbets, 2010). Digital tools like Cinema Context are highly useful for documenting and analyzing films’ track records, a concept that d­ eserves more attention in moviegoing history. Studying a track record involves tracing events, and connecting the dots. Track records are based on past performance, they are full of ­h istorical and geographical detail, and they have a timeline. You can interconnect, analyze and ­v isualize the data of track records – not just of films, but also of companies, cinemas, and people. Cinema Context contains an almost complete catalogue of every film shown in the ­Netherlands, a huge number of weekly cinema programs up to 1947, a listing of all movie theaters in the past and all censorship ratings. At the same time, it allows researchers to analyze the available data and to study patterns and networks, the DNA of film culture. The analysis will focus on film exhibition patterns in six cities between 1915 and 1940: Amsterdam, Rotterdam, The Hague, Utrecht, Groningen, and Leiden. About 25 percent of the Dutch population lived in these cities, where a third of all cinemas were located, generating almost two-thirds of the nation’s box office revenue. The dataset runs from 1910 to 1947 to provide some additional insight in developments before and after the period under consideration. It contains the records of 126,961 weekly cinema programs showing 16,367 films. The cinema programs in the database are catalogued by week, not by day or by screening. All films shown in a venue during a week – excluding the shorts on a supporting bill after 1918 – are compiled as a single program. Venues with multiple screens did not exist at the time. The weekly frequency resembles more or less the publication of ads in the local newspapers, the source of the data.

In search of evergreens Evergreens are films with a very long track record, spanning many years of activity in exhibition and distribution. Figure 26.1 presents a timeline of the evergreens with the longest lifespan ranging from fifteen to 23 years. The eleven films had a robust presence on the

L’Enfant de Paris (1913) Les Enfants du Capitaine Grant (1914)

23 20 17

Hygiene der Ehe (1922) 17

Boy Scouts be prepared (1917) Tom Brown’s school days (1916) Hans en Grietje (XX)

16 16 15

Ben-Hur (1925) Op hoop van zegen (1918)

15

Le Avventure di Robinson Crusoe (1922)

15

Tischlein deck dich, Eselein streck dich (1921)

15 15

Epic of Everest (1924) 1910

1915

Figure 26.1  Films with the longest lifespan until 1940 (in years) Note: Lifespan in years is noted to the left of the timeline.

332

1920

1925

1930

1935

1940

The evergreens and mayflies of film history

screen over the years. Each title accumulated a substantial number of playweeks in regular cinemas. Some may have been absent from the screen for a while but never more than three years in a row before coming back again. Every evergreen can tell a story of its own: it has a biography to show and offers a rich case of reception history. The most senior evergreen of all is a French film directed by Léonce Perret, L’Enfant de Paris (The Child of Paris, Gaumont, 1913). The film began its career in Dutch cinemas in 1913 and had a run of 23 years until 1935, hardly missing a year. It tells the story of a little girl who loses her rich parents and tries to survive in the miserable slums of Paris until she is rescued miraculously. The film became a popular item in youth matinees early on even though it lasted two hours, an extraordinary length for the time of its production. In 1933, a minor distributor called Globe Film released L’Enfant de Paris for the last time in a shortened version, but its time was running out and the final screening took place in 1935. The list includes several more films for a youthful audience, imported from different countries across Europe. One can imagine that these old-timers have fostered a tradition in the nation’s moviegoing experience while developing shared memories between generations. A telling example is the nonfiction film Hygiene der Ehe (Marital Hygiene, Pan–Film, 1922), which is in many ways a significant outsider on the list. It was a sex education film made in Austria, shown all over the Netherlands in special programs for young couples from 1924 to 1940. A medical doctor used to be present in the cinema to explain the pictures. Hygiene der Ehe introduced the facts of life to a generation that still remembered the dire emotions of watching L’Enfant de Paris. As a silent film it had an unprecedented run of sixteen weeks at the Capitol Theater in The Hague in 1937, many years after the introduction of talking pictures. The Epic of Everest (Explorers’ Films, 1924) was another nonfiction film that made it to the top list, a gripping documentary of a Himalayan expedition that played to the imagination of several generations. Ben-Hur is probably the only picture on the list that took advantage of the introduction of sound technology. It was reissued in 1932 with an added sound track and began a new and successful life in the cinemas. The data in Figure 26.1 refer to public screenings in commercial venues only. As the evergreens grow older and older, they would have been exhibited more often in local societies and school halls than in regular cinemas. Not for profit organizations may have been in competition with these cinemas for youthful audiences, but the distributor of evergreens would supply all customers. The list of evergreens is much longer of course; Figure 26.1 only shows the most consistent specimens. Other films developed a similar but more fragile timeline with increasing intervals and infrequent screenings. It was by no means exceptional for a film to begin a second life after quite a long absence from the screen. For instance, Among the Cannibal Isles of the South Pacific (Martin Johnson Film Co., 1918) disappeared from the screen in 1927 but came back in 1934. Moreover, the list does not include any talking pictures made in the 1930s, because they were less than fifteen years of age in 1940 and cannot be counted as evergreens. All films in our sample are silent, a feature that did not become a handicap after the introduction of sound in 1929. This strong continuity and the disregard of technological change are signs of a popular ritual. In addition, short films have been omitted from the list due to a lack of information about them. It is, however, safe to say that old slapstick films from the 1910s remained a popular item of the supporting programs up to 1940. Some distributors gained a reputation for working the niche market of old films. The two oldest evergreens, L’Enfant de Paris (1913) and Les Enfants du Capitaine Grant (Éclair, 1914), 333

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had been released originally by the distribution company of Jean Desmet, who sold his prints to another distributor, Filma (Blom, 2003). The latter would become a supplier of at least five evergreens.

The age distribution of films To understand the relative place of old movies in film exhibition we need to take new releases into consideration as well. Figure 26.2 shows the age distribution of films in exhibition from 1915 to 1947. The chart visualizes the changing share of old and new films in the programs of the cinema sector as a whole. The relative age of the films is presented in groups of three years each. The first group includes films not older than three years, the second group is of films between four and six years, the third films between seven and nine, and the last group holds films of ten years and more. Age distribution is an important dimension of a program profile. The chart shows how the age distribution evolves gradually until 1937 and more dramatically thereafter. The figure makes it obvious instantly that the youngest age group with the latest films covers the largest area of the chart’s surface, with between 75 and 85 percent of the annual film supply falling into this category before 1940. This group commands all attention in film culture because it contains the first releases and generates a lot of publicity, and film historians also concentrate on what happens here. We tend to overlook that these figures include only a few very successful films and a great many failures, films that, as I will discuss later, have never been booked for more than a few weeks before vanishing in the vaults forever. According to Figure 26.2, old movies comprised a considerable proportion of films in exhibition. Between 15 and 25 percent of the film supply had been in circulation for four years or more in the period up to the Second World War, and this increased to about 50 percent

100% 90% 80% 70% 60% 50% 10+ years 7–9 years 4–6 years 1–3 years

40% 30% 20% 10% 0% 1915

1920

1925

1930

1935

1940

Figure 26.2  A ge distribution of old and new films in exhibition in six cities, 1915–1947 Note: Amsterdam, Den Haag, Groningen, Leiden, Rotterdam, Utrecht.

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The evergreens and mayflies of film history

during the war. This is a remarkable finding. It means that obsolete movies must have played an important and distinctive role in exhibition and distribution. They were always there, in stock, in use, on screen. The chart tells us little about the success and popularity of these films, but they would not have been around in such volume without sufficient appreciation. What was on display in the cinemas, moreover, represented only the tip of an iceberg, a sample taken from the overstocked vaults of distribution companies. As the following examples suggest, it is arguable that the backlog of old supplies had a stabilizing effect on the industry in uncertain times. The war years under German occupation in the Netherlands in 1940–1945 caused a ­significant change in the age distribution of films in circulation. The sudden loss of fresh imports from the USA and Britain could not be adequately replaced with new German ­productions. The cinemas were forced to rerun a lot of German pre-war movies like ­Königswalzer (UFA, 1935) and Leichte Kavallerie (UFA, 1935), two musical hits from 1935. The liberation of the country in 1945 meant a complete reversal in film supply and its ­provenance, but not so much in age distribution. The demand for American and British productions was unlimited and could not be satisfied immediately by new releases. Instead, theaters fell back again on films that had been released before the war, this time ­A merican and British movies including successful comedies like The Bohemian Girl (Hal Roach/MGM, 1936) and It’s in the Air (MGM, 1938). As a result, in 1945 and 1946, 60 percent of all films in exhibition were seven or more years old. The coming of sound also left its mark on the age distribution of films. The chart shows that in 1930 new releases temporarily gave way to vintage pictures. The slowly increasing influx of talking pictures could not offset the drop in silent film premieres, and older movies filled the gap. It is tempting to see here the effects of the economic depression, but it is a bit too early for that to happen. The supply of old films apparently served various functions at different times and for a diversity of audiences. The film trade was well prepared for such circumstances and kept its vaults well stocked. The HAP Film Company in The Hague is a case in point. It published a brand new film rental catalogue in 1922 with descriptions of hundreds of old films, fiction as well as nonfiction, dating back to 1914. HAP Film was by no means the only company with a stockroom full of depreciating films waiting for a sales opportunity. The Dutch film distributor Jean Desmet stopped buying new films in 1915, but kept his stockpile of vintage prints in store, including two latent evergreens, L’Enfant de Paris (1913) and Les Enfants du Capitaine Grant (1914), which he sold later. After his death in 1956, the collection of more than a thousand films was moved to the archives of the Eye Film Museum (Blom, 2003: 334). The hidden potential of old movies came finally to light in 1928 when national film censorship was introduced in the Netherlands. Every film in stock had to be rated by the authorities before being allowed a public screening. The film distributors unloaded their vaults and the censors were able to make a comprehensive inventory of all extant films available for rent in the country at the time. It emerged that thousands of old movies had been amassed in hopes of future gains, however small. The hoard of obsolete film prints in Dutch vaults must have been a nightmare for any producer. It was not in their interest for old prints to remain in circulation. In the USA, ­Hollywood studios always struggled with the growing stockpile of old movies in their own vaults (Hoyt, 2014). These film libraries, as they came to be known, represented a huge investment in films and stars. The studios tried to find ways to recover their idle assets and create a ­m arket for the film libraries. Reissues of popular movies would attract new audiences (Hannan, 2016). To control the market of old movies, the studios began to distribute new films on 335

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condition that the prints be destroyed after a certain date. It seems, however, that this rule was a dead letter in the Netherlands before 1928 and probably for many years thereafter.

The mayfly films The opposite of the evergreen is the mayfly film, which fails to be exhibited for more than three weeks in its entire lifespan. Its run is usually restricted to one or two cinemas. Like mayflies in nature, these short-lived films come in huge numbers. They are the cinders of history. The mayfly movie is an almost invisible but persistent and substantial feature of film exhibition and distribution. The phenomenon has not been studied before and its size deserves more attention than this article allows for. Table 26.1 shows how film age is related to screen time. The first two rows indicate that 75 percent of all films disappeared from view within three years after their release. The second column shows that 26 percent were never shown for more than three weeks ever. This latter group are the mayfly films. The vast majority of this ghostlike group will vanish quietly and never come back. They lack any commercial viability of their own except as a show filler or part of a package deal. The origins of most mayflies can be traced back to a few countries. As might be expected from a major supplier responsible for more than half of all imports, American films play an important role. About one third of new US releases would not survive three weeks’ exhibition. German films once counted for a quarter of all imports, and again one out of three films turned out to become a mayfly movie. French production shows a similar pattern, although its import share is only 7 percent. Overall, a quarter of all new films disappeared forever within a few weeks after their first screening. Mayfly films did not travel well. Their limited circulation reduced their accessibility and exposure. The likelihood that people from two different cities may have seen the same mayfly movie is very small indeed, indicating that film culture must have been extremely fragmented in the past. A profound lack of cohesion is also an obstacle to making generalizations. The idea that one can understand film exhibition and moviegoing in a nation if one examines a single city as a case study does not hold. Even a comparative approach may become fruitless when cities or regions share so little between them. Fifty years later, Table 26.1  Film age and screen time in six cities, 1920–1940 % unique films Film age in years*

With 1–3 playweeks With >3 playweeks

1 2–3 4–6 7–9

17 8 1

10–12 13+ Total

26

(N=10320). *

Number of years in circulation.

336

Total

9 41 17 4

26 49 18 4

2

2

1

1

74

100

The evergreens and mayflies of film history

however, the exhibition branch had transformed into a fully integrated and unified national, indeed international, market. Films could be released in hundreds or even thousands of venues on the same day. The industry had changed thoroughly and the biotope of mayflies had disappeared. In the 1920s and 1930s, the Dutch film market appeared to be flooded with cheap product every year. Large numbers of throwaways and show fillers were imported and distributed with the certain prospect that they would have an extremely short lifecycle. Since mayfly movies show up in so many cinemas across the country, it is fair to say that this trade practice had become a well-established principle. Some venues, moreover, specialized in exhibiting mayflies in order to survive at a minimum level. One may argue that the motion picture business always has had winners and losers, with a small number of films bringing in the largest share of earnings. Still, the glut of poorly performing films is astonishing. The pyramid of successful films had an extremely wide base of failures. As John Sedgwick and Clara Pafort-Overduin (2012) have noted, the oversupply and fragmentation displayed by these figures point to an underdeveloped industry with a very weak infrastructure. Although the number of mayfly films is stunning, it should be put in perspective. The quantity of short-lived films cannot hide the fact that their share in screen time is limited. Figure 26.3 shows the changing distribution of screen time over thirty years. The mayflies occupy the lower area with one to three playweeks per film; their share in screen time (including the occasional old-timers) dropped from 35 to 25 percent. This figure stands in stark contrast to Figure 26.2’s representation of film supply, where the mayflies and other new releases often amounted to more than 75 percent. Films with ten or more playweeks began to increase their share of total screen time strikingly from the late 1920s onwards.

100% 90% 80% 70% 60% 50% 10+ weeks 7–9 weeks 4–6 weeks 1–3 weeks

40% 30% 20% 10% 0% 1915

1920

1925

1930

1935

1940

Figure 26.3  Percentage of screen time for films in exhibition in six cities, 1915–1945

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Cinemas and old movies As we have seen so far, old movies obtained a discreet but steady foothold in film culture during the period under discussion, almost becoming an institution of their own. The question arises whether specific venues can be associated with the exhibition of evergreens and old-timers. From a macro point of view, one could also ask to what extent old films could define the program profile of the cinema sector as a whole. It is unlikely that they were distributed equally or randomly over all cinemas alike. Figure 26.4 visualizes how the share of cinemas exhibiting films over three years old changed before 1940. Between 10 and 30 ­percent of all venues would never show an outdated movie at all, while a majority of 50–60 percent used to exhibit less than a dozen old-timers per year. A small but growing echelon of cinemas, however, offered a minimum of twenty outmoded films every year. The practice of showing old movies had become an integral part of their business model. The top ten of these heavy users – and probably the rest as well – consisted of movie theaters of some local repute, owned by a home-grown management, operating independently of cinema chains, and selecting a specific mixture of films for its neighborhood patrons who did not seem to crave for the most recent releases. They were also keen to offer special matinees for youthful visitors and entertain them with old-timers. The Casino Theater in Leiden led the top ten for quite some time, developing a long-standing tradition of showing obsolete films as the major attraction of its programs. For many years it would exhibit 25 to 60 old-timers per season. Elsewhere, the Rialto in Amsterdam and the Colosseum in Rotterdam shared a top ranking with a curious mix of brand new films and old-timers. Although the lines in Figure 26.4 are oscillating, two periods stand out. Between 1929 and 1933 the proportion of cinemas with more than ten old films on offer grew markedly. This expansion was induced by the arrival of talking pictures when cinemas

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Figure 26.4  Percentage of cinemas showing films over three years old in six cities, 1920–1940

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continued to show the aging silents alongside the new sound films for some time. The German occupation of the Netherlands in May 1940 had also a strong impact on the use of obsolete movies as more and more cinemas were forced to exhibit pre-war films from Germany. The number of cinemas frequently showing outdated films had been quite small in the early 1920s, indicating that the accumulation of old feature films was still in progress at the time. The exhibition of lengthy movies had been a fairly recent phenomenon; short films had dominated the screens until 1914 and were moved gradually to a supporting program. This explains to some extent the marketing strategy behind the HAP Film Company’s publication of a rental catalogue for old films in 1922. After 1925, a sizable portion of the cinema sector would become addicted to showing obsolete movies.

Conclusion What began as a qualitative analysis to answer a simple question about old movies in exhibition, gradually developed into a data-driven research project as unexpected patterns popped up in time-based datasets. My historical enquiry found itself motivated by the discovery of unusual structures in research data, not the other way around. At the same time, the case of the evergreens demonstrates how a quantitative approach may give a fresh impulse to qualitative studies and shed a new light on individual films that would have gone unnoticed otherwise. It transpires that L’Enfant de Paris (1913) was not an anomaly with a lengthy lifespan, but a feature of a wider phenomenon in film culture. This study started as an exploration of evergreen movies that enjoyed a lifespan of more than fifteen years in exhibition. To describe and analyze this phenomenon, a new concept was introduced, the age distribution of films in exhibition. This concept allows one to study the mixture of old and new films in cinemas, to chart distinct patterns and juxtapose the prolonged life cycle of old-timers with the short-lived careers of poorly performing films, or mayfly movies. Although very few films would reach the venerable status of evergreens in the Netherlands before 1940, hundreds remained in circulation for four years or more. Most cinemas would show an old-timer occasionally, but between 5 and 10 percent of movie theaters developed a program profile in which outdated films featured strongly or even dominantly. At the other end of the age scale, a huge number of mayfly movies showed up only to disappear completely from public view within a few weeks of their first release. The latter phenomenon deserves more attention since the number of flops is amazing. Old-timers and mayflies together once represented half of the film repertoire in cinemas. Instead of being regarded as an inconspicuous mishmash on the fringe, they should be seen as a distinctive feature of film culture and a relevant force of film marketing.

Acknowledgment I would like to thank John Sedgwick for his comments, which greatly improved the manuscript.

Note 1 The marketing hierarchy of first-, second-, and third-run cinemas, reflecting the temporal order in which films were shown in cinemas, falls outside the scope of this article. It is doubtful whether such a system had been fully developed in the Netherlands before 1940.

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References Blom, I. (2003) Jean Desmet and the Early Dutch Film Trade. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Cinema Context www.cinemacontext.nl [Accessed 29 November 2018] Dibbets, K. (2010) “Cinema Context and the Genes of Film History.” New Review of Film and Television Studies 8(3): 331–342. Hannan, B. (2016) Coming Back to a Theater Near You: Hollywood Reissues 1914–2014. Jefferson, NC: McFarland. ­ alifornia Hoyt, E. (2014) Hollywood Vault: Film Libraries before Home Video. Berkeley, CA: University of C Press. Sedgwick J. (2000) Popular Filmgoing in 1930s Britain. A Choice of Pleasures. Exeter: University of Exeter Press. Sedgwick, J. and Pafort-Overduin, C. (2012) “Understanding Audience Behavior through Statistical Evidence: London and Amsterdam in the Mid-1930s.” In I. Christie (ed.), Audiences: Defining and Researching Screen Entertainment Reception. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press (pp. 96–110). Sedgwick, J., Pafort-Overduin, C., and Boter, J. (2012) “Explanations for the Restrained Development of the Dutch Cinema Market in the 1930s.” Enterprise & Society 13(3): 634–671. Van de Vijver, L. (2012) “Distributie en exploitatie van film te Gent: een historische typologie op basis van de programmeringsprofielen.” Tijdschrift voor Sociale en Economische Geschiedenis 9(2): 73–100.

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Part VI

Audiences, reception, and cinemagoing experiences

Introduction Audiences, reception, and cinemagoing experiences have been at the core of the new cinema history project from its beginnings and, as the general Introduction to this Companion discusses, many of the most influential studies of how audiences gave meaning to cinemagoing practices, specific films, stars and venues predate the project’s existence as a conscious intervention in cinema historiography. Although research on audiences and reception became mainstream within television and media studies in the 1980s, film history proved much slower to shift its focus, even partially, from film texts to audiences. When the medium first became the dominant form of public entertainment, the study of its audiences attracted both academic and industry interest, and many sociological and psychological studies from the 1910s to the 1950s have by now been reintegrated into film historiography (see Chapter 1). But for a combination of institutional, ideological, and theoretical reasons, the study of actual viewers disappeared from academic film studies, replaced by the abstract construct of the spectator-in-the-text, infused with ideas originating in psychoanalysis and semiotics. Only with the formulation of a revisionist historiography, initiated in the mid-1980s but not reaching critical mass until the 2000s, has there been a sustained call for a return to studying flesh and blood audiences, in order to “rewrite cinema histories from below” (Maltby, 2006). The empirical study of historical audiences is fraught with methodological obstacles. It is also arguably the most urgent task in cinema history, since with each passing year the subjects of its research disappear, taking their precious memories and experiences with them. All chapters reflect a methodological concern to reconstruct lived cinema history with audiences, taking care to treat their discursive reconstructions as mediated markers of past experiences, and not as providing direct access to a moment long gone. The first two contributions explicitly address methodological issues, both at the epistemological level of choosing a paradigm to work with and at the practical level of exploring how to work with particular tools for grasping memories. In their opening contribution, Daniela Treveri Gennari, Silvia Dibeltulo, Danielle Hipkins, and Catherine O’Rawe draw on the collaborative research project “Italian Cinema Audiences,” exploring memories of cinemagoing in Italy in the 1950s and illustrating the importance of cinema as a social

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experience in everyday life. Working with more than a thousand questionnaires and 160 interviews, the authors aim to produce a new history of Italian audiences. At the same time, they focus on the methodological issue of how to deal with memories captured in ­v ideo-interviews rather than written questionnaires. They analyze and integrate the nuances of recorded speech, gesture, and comportment into their overall research, capturing their interviewees’ “embodied memories.” In their analysis the remembered object, which might be the act of cinemagoing, the venue, or a star, is mediated both through the passage of time and through the oral history performance itself. Their examples show how the memories of stars’ appearances and behavior are reshaped as part of the interviewees’ habitual, gendered actions; how the cinemagoers’ interactions with the place and space of cinemas shape their memory of the experience itself; and how audience laughter operated along gendered lines, with male attempts at seduction met by female tactics of self-defense. Stephen Putnam Hughes brings a different perspective to the social experience of cinema, exploring an historical phenomenology of filmgoing. Combining recent scholarship emphasizing “the relationship between viewer and viewer” with his own empirical examples from the history of exhibition in the south Indian city of Madras (now Chennai) during the early decades of the twentieth century, Hughes investigates the social sense of being part of an audience in the experience of bodily proximity – of viewers “within touching and smelling distances of each other” – while watching films. Hughes distinguishes between three kinds of embodied social sensibility at the cinema: a routine, taken-for-granted sense of being part of a collectivity of people; a more organized sense in which audience members are actively involved in the show through the theater’s promotional activities and competitions; and the sense produced by unplanned and spontaneous incidents during the screening. Cinemagoing also offered its audience an opportunity to participate in a public performance of class and racial hierarchy through their behavior, as part of the “rowdy element” in the cheaper seats or the “orderly, well-behaved” patrons in the more expensive seats above and behind them. Hughes explains how cinema audiences came to understand their own collective social experience through these distinct manifestations of social sense. Cinema audiences can also be studied through the institutional or commercial discourses that address or construct them. Paul S. Moore presents a detailed study of the movie directories in 1920s newspapers, which provided informative timetables identifying which film was playing at which theater. Moore demonstrates how, by the early 1920s, amusement at the movies had become an extension of the nuclear family’s middle-class home, central to the modern ideology of mass consumption. Newspapers operated as advance agents for movies, their directories enabling moviegoers to find their own show and their own class of audience. Moore’s discursive and visual analysis of five “Early Buying Bulletins” explicitly addressing cinema reveals their projection of an idealized form of moviegoing, with an emphasis on the father’s responsibility for choosing the family’s entertainment. Unlike other domestic matters in which the mother was the authority, the Bulletins that Moore examines constructed the movies as a paternalistic form of consumption, with the father charged with being the authoritative consumer. The directories provided him with the ideal tool to avoid the danger of making an irrational choice of movie, which might threaten his patriarchal authority. Audience research tends to be focused on specific time periods and comparative longitudinal approaches are rare. Using a large-scale survey of contemporary youth audiences in Belgium and an oral history study of historical cinema audiences, Lies Van de Vijver investigates why young audiences go to the cinema in the present digital era, and compares their responses to the motivations for cinemagoing in the 1950s. Her findings highlight the 342

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persistently social nature of cinemagoing. The digital generation has never known the city center cinema palaces, only frequenting multiplexes. Although they have a multitude of movie-watching platforms available to them, they show a surprising fondness for cinemagoing, and their motivations for watching a movie on the big screen are strongly reminiscent of those of earlier audiences. Both historical and contemporary audiences recount their cinemagoing through memories of treasured company or the eventfulness of blockbuster experiences. Going to the movies remains a social activity, not susceptible to substitution by individual consumer opportunities. Cinema is still best understood as selling a habit, a certain type of socialized experience. This volume ends with a chapter by Mariagrazia Fanchi which, like the opening chapter of this Part on audiences and cinemagoing, focuses on Italy in the 1950s. Fanchi makes a case for the heuristic value of audience studies in understanding the social, cultural, and political function of cinema in that period of Italian history. Using regional statistics on cinema consumption, reports on moviegoing commissioned by advertising agencies, and ethnographic accounts of living conditions in different areas of the country, her method takes its inspiration from historian Carlo Ginzburg’s circumstantial model, examining unconventional sources and matters of little apparent influence in order to revisit and revise the assumptions of received history. This approach allows Fanchi to deconstruct the conventional account of the spread of cinemagoing and its modernizing role in Italian social life by identifying profound social and geographical differences in cinema attendance and popularity. Italian cinema’s subsequent crisis, she also argues, was not only due to the arrival of television but was a consequence of the uneven patterns of moviegoing in the country and of cinema’s failure to engage several social groups. Fanchi’s chapter concludes with a new analysis of cinema’s failure in southern Italy as being caused by the combination of an ineffective political approach and a cinema experience that was alien to the aspirations and life models of the people in the South.

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27 Analyzing memories through video-interviews A case study of post-war Italian cinemagoing Daniela Treveri Gennari, Silvia Dibeltulo, Danielle Hipkins, and Catherine O’Rawe “Italian Cinema Audiences” is a collaborative research project exploring memories of cinemagoing in Italy in the 1950s, which ran from 2013 to 2016.1 The project’s research sits within the work of new cinema history, since it borrows social and cultural historical methodologies to produce a new history of Italian audiences. The project focuses particularly on the importance of cinema in everyday life, and the social experience of cinemagoing, by interviewing audience members, analyzing their responses using qualitative data analysis software and contextualizing these responses through further archival research. In the first stage of this process, over a thousand Italians aged over 65 were asked to respond to a structured questionnaire in order to elicit both statistical data about their filmgoing experiences as well as their memories. Assisted by the cultural organization Blumedia and Italian University of the Third Age, the questionnaire was distributed to a range of participants from eight provincial and eight urban locations. The cities of Bari, Rome, Turin, Milan, Palermo, Naples, Cagliari, and Florence were selected from the sixteen urban centers used by AGIS (Associazione Generale Italiana dello Spettacolo, the Italian National Exhibitors Association) to monitor box-office intake in the chosen period. Urban locations were complemented by provincial locations in Puglia, Lazio, Piedmont, Lombardy, Sicily, Campania, Sardinia, and Tuscany. Our responses were divided almost equally between men and women, between city and province, and crossed a full range of class backgrounds.2 In the second stage of the project, we gathered half-hour topical interviews with 160 ­Italians from a similar cross-section of the population. 3 The data collected in the questionnaires and video-interviews has been augmented by box-office takings, programming and exhibition data, and archival and press material from the period. This comprehensive resource allows a new approach to Italian cinema history, in which oral history can be read against quantitative data about film distribution, box office records, cinema attendance, publicity material and critical readings from the press, and diaries held in the National Diary Archive (Fondazione Archivio Diaristico Nazionale). This chapter focuses on investigating the methodological implications of the use of video interviews as opposed to written questionnaires, as an investigative tool that elicits audience memories. Our methodology combines a thematic analysis of the video interviews with a study of the specific ways in which memories are narrated by the respondents. This dual approach aims to examine how participants construct themselves in their narratives, and to take the opportunity to engage in large-scale oral 344

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historical research without losing traces of “the oral, narrative, dialogic origin of the materials we work with” (Portelli, 2005: 6). We also interrogate the additional challenges posed by the use of video technologies; as Graham Murdock and Sarah Pink (2005: 153) point out, “by capturing emotional expression, facial and body language, and spatial relations,” video technologies “foreground dimensions of representation that have escaped from the prison house of language.” In this context, we will discuss both verbal and nonverbal aspects of the video testimonies we have collected. Undertaking this research attuned us to the complexities of working with video i­nterviews as a medium of memory, and brought attention to ways in which the remembered object (the act of cinemagoing, the venue, the film, the star, etc.) is mediated through both the passage of time and the oral history performance itself. In turn, the mediation of these memories can tell us what it is about the cinemagoing experience that “sticks” in an affective sense (Ahmed, 2004: 4), and how these mediated memories may have participated in the redefinition of identity itself. The examples provided in this chapter will demonstrate how the multiple levels of communication entailed in the video interviews reveal new insights into participants’ relationship with the experience of cinemagoing. In particular, they will shed light on memories of stardom, the significance of the spatial dimension of cinema, patterns of socially acceptable and unacceptable behaviors in the cinema, and the processes of cinematic canon formation.

Memory-making and video interviews as a methodological tool As Maurice Halbwachs (1992: 38) has stated, “there exists a collective memory and social frameworks for memory; it is to the degree that our individual thought places itself in these frameworks and participates in this memory that it is capable of the act of recollection.” Our approach to memory as the object of our study takes into account this aspect of the act of remembering. Individual narratives are investigated both as personal experience and as a manifestation of the collective identity of a specific group.4 In this chapter, we address the personal aspects of recollection as they emerge from the oral history performance. However, these individual acts of recollection are also indices of a collective dimension of memory, or can be read within and against a broader cultural horizon. Jan Assmann and John Czaplicka (1995) highlight the cultural dimension – as opposed to the biological one – of collective memory. They argue that “cultural memory has its fixed point,” represented by “fateful events of the past, whose memory is maintained through cultural formation (texts, rites, monuments) and institutional communication (recitation, practice, observance)” (Assmann and Czaplicka, 1995: 129). In our case, those cultural formations include films once watched, cinemagoing rituals and practices of that time, as well as cinemas as monuments that symbolize those historical practices. Following Astrid Erll’s (2008: 390) reflection on the ability of different media to “create and mould collective images of the past,” we claim that cinema’s inherent audio–visual nature makes it a powerful medium in the production and formation of cultural memory. Throughout the project, we organized a series of “Sharing Memories” events. These were public engagement events, where we screened films and clips from our ­v ideo-interviews, and afterwards audiences offered recollections of their cinemagoing experiences. In these events, it became clear that the audio–visual medium has had a powerful effect on our participants, whose collective as well as individual memories were triggered by the viewing of their most memorable films as well as by clips of video interviews where those memories were being articulated. Several participants emphasized the significance of the visual 345

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medium when reconstructing in the present the memories of the past.5 The events of the past become “contemporized” through memory (Assmann and Czaplicka, 1995: 129). In other terms, they are “constructed and reconstructed in the present rather than resurrected from the past” (Rigney, 2005: 14).6 The video interview as a methodological tool allowed us to capture precisely this process of constructing and reconstructing the participants’ past in the present of their narration. The use of video in oral history has caused “a great deal of controversy” in the past ­(Gardner, 1984: 105). Aspects that have been deemed problematic include the intrusion of a technological medium between the interviewer and the interviewee, the interview’s potential manipulation during post-production editing, the interviewee’s s­ elf-awareness of the ­process as a possible inhibitor in the dialogue, and the impossibility of completely ­a nonymizing the participant. At the same time, over the past few decades, several s­ cholars have ­advocated the importance of engaging with the orality of the oral source (see P ­ ortelli, 1991:  64), and audio recording has been widely employed in oral history research. This ­methodology has ­a llowed the capture of significant linguistic aspects (tone, volume, ­register, etc.) which would otherwise be lost in written accounts, notwithstanding the use of standard transcription conventions.7 Following Martin Barker and Ernest Mathijs’ methodological approach to audience studies (2007), we used questionnaires to identify themes and patterns which would allow a “subsequent exploration of rich semantic seams” in the video-interviews (Barker, 2009: 387). These themes and patterns constituted the basis of our qualitative analysis, which was conducted through a dual approach. Firstly, we employed NVivo, a qualitative data analysis software that enabled us to code recurrent motifs as well as to identify areas which had not emerged during the quantitative phase of our analysis.8 In particular, the software allowed us to classify audio–visual segments of the interviews which could be retrieved at any time by researchers interested in any of the aspects coded. This technique facilitates selective analysis, without having to view entire videos, and therefore offers the researcher a more comprehensive alternative to transcripts without compromising the richness of the audio– visual testimony. Moreover, the creation of thematic clusters provides the opportunity to “reveal the complex qualities of people’s experiences” both at individual and at collective levels (Barker, 2009: 382). At the same time, we complemented this NVivo analysis with short written portraits for each participant, with the aim of summarizing how the story of the experience of cinemagoing is narrated.9 These portraits included the general background of the interviewee, key concepts and experiences, as well as modalities of delivery and nonverbal communication. The portrait was used in our project as an analytical tool to identify how the construction of the self in the narrative is presented as well as ways in which memories are narrated. The interviews’ content does not present unmediated events that occurred in the past, but reveals “deeper layers of people’s thinking,” indicating the “centuries-long development of the culture” in which they have grown up (Yow, 1994: 24). For instance, a heritage of heteronormativity within the dominant Italian Catholic culture of that time emerges when one of the interviewees, Sebastiana (born in Sardinia in 1927), voices her disappointment at having recently discovered Laurence Olivier’s alleged homosexuality.10 Sebastiana’s idea of the masculinity embodied by Olivier, specifically in Wuthering Heights (Goldwyn/United Artists, 1939), is inescapably connected to heterosexuality, reflecting the culture in which she was brought up. This example demonstrates how in the narration process, what the interviewees offer is much more than simple anecdotes. By re-creating the past as it was lived, they communicate the richness of the cinemagoing experience and articulate the context in which it occurred. Moreover, as in 346

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Sebastiana’s case, the individual testimony sheds light not only on her background, but also on the ideological paradigms that shaped audiences’ relationship with stars based on normative gender assumptions. This confirms how, in contrast with questionnaires, which only provide concise responses to specific questions, the v­ ideo-interview allows for the emergence of contextual material which reveals a great deal about cultural and social circumstances that shaped audiences’ reactions at the time. At the same time, the audio–visual medium is paramount in gaining insight into how individual interviewees construct themselves in their narratives, through both verbal and nonverbal communication.

Embodied and performative memories Video interviews present distinct and specific challenges in audience research. While they allow us to engage more fully with the orality of the oral source, they provide us with a plethora of information (verbal, vocal, gestural, bodily) to interpret alongside and in conjunction with the content itself of the interviews. Thus, one fundamental question we have posited in our research has been: how do we analyze and integrate the nuances of speech, gesture and body into our overall research, capturing what Annette Kuhn has called embodied memory? By this, Kuhn (2002: 147) means the “all-encompassing somatic, sensuous and affective involvement in the cinema experience.” By focusing on the embodied recounting of that memory we can recover traces of this significant dimension of the cinema experience. Here we ask what new understanding of the role of cinemagoing and its relationship to identity these traces of embodiment can provide. In recent years, interest in the field of oral history has focused on the importance of accessing and making tangible the voice of speakers and interviewees, and the ways in which digital technologies might shift oral history’s focus to “the actual voice (orality, in all its meanings), and embodied voices and contexts” or “aurality” (Frisch, 2006: 107). Relatively little attention has, however, been paid to the precise interaction of speech, body language, gesture, and affect; these combine to give a picture of how a subject constructs him/herself through the interview, and how s/he both constructs and embodies a relationship to the remembered object (the act of cinemagoing, the venue, the film, the star). So what happens when we consider the “embodied interaction of interviewer and narrator” (Friedman, 2014: 291) in oral histories of filmgoing, or Alessandro Portelli’s (2005) “narrative, dialogic origin of the materials we work with”? In examining gesture, we are mindful of Adam Kendon’s words (2004: 5) that “although we still lack an adequate conceptual apparatus, transcription system and terminology for dealing with gesture, sound-synchronised visual recordings make it possible to turn moments of gesture use into objects of inspection”; gestures, in conjunction with speech, operate within and contribute to “socially shared communicative codes.” Hand gestures, body movement and seemingly more instinctive types of gesture such as laughter and weeping are all “communicative resources” (McNeill, 2000: 11), as well as integral to social interaction. Our aim in thinking about gesture and verbal language together is not to produce fixed typologies of gesture and meaning but to investigate how uses of gesture might fall within certain conventional patterns that allow us to detect ways in which gestures are “expressive of thought or feeling” (Kendon, 2004: 8). “Embodied memory” is particularly marked in our interviewees’ discussion of their memories of stardom. For example, when Giorgio (born in 1936, from Turin) is asked about a strong memory of a particular film, he recalls James Dean’s performance in East of Eden (Warner Bros., 1955), narrating and reimagining a particular scene, in which Dean’s 347

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Figure 27.1  Giorgio’s gaze when remembering James Dean in East of Eden

character lies in the field and measures the beans. Interestingly, the scene in the film lasts for only thirty seconds, and seems an example of what Jackie Stacey (1994: 67) talks of as “the frozen moment” – or “iconic memory,” “taken out of its temporal context and captured as ‘pure image.’” What is particularly striking is the direction of Giorgio’s gaze, as he looks off into the distance, and the wistful tone of his voice when he says “James Dean.” As he narrates the scene he imitates the character’s movements, turning his head as Dean does, and raising his hand to imitate measuring the beans (see Figure 27.1). Giorgio is particularly interesting because he narrates all these memories, not just those relating to stars, in the present tense, using expressions like “I see it now… I am there,” and he demonstrates how oral history narratives often access the past as “a kind of quasi-present, so that we can tell that story from the perspective of the past” (Friedman, 2014: 296). The particularly intense relationships between stars and audience members are often imprinted upon the body of the interviewee: Giorgio goes on to relive his reactions to the star performance of Marlon Brando in A Streetcar Named Desire (Warner Bros., 1951), also recalling a particular scene, in which Brando’s character smashes up the dining table in a fit of temper. Giorgio narrates the scene to the interviewer (“I remember him wearing just the vest … I remember his outbursts of rage which frighten me, a simple spectator”), and as he narrates, he cowers in his seat, adopts a frightened expression, and brings his hands to his face, illustrating a powerful bodily response in remembering;11 this signals his intense affective relationship, even in memory, with that scene.12 Brando is also a focus of attention for Edoardo (born in 1938, from Turin), who d­ iscusses how as boys he and his friends liked to imitate Brando’s dress and behavior; as he says the name “Marlon Brando” he makes a dynamic hand gesture that complements his tone of voice, which is full of joy and excitement. These remembered moments, which in the ­v ideo interview expresses both the memory itself and the pleasure in remembering, provide us with new evidence about how viewers engage with stars on an intimate, imitative level, the product of physical repetition of the star’s action imprinting itself on the body. ­Likewise Antonio (born in 1933, from Naples) also talks of imitation, this time of Humphrey ­Bogart, and for him it is the act of cigarette smoking that is the memory vehicle: “Humphrey ­Bogart’s cigarette … the smoke coming out of it … it made you want to smoke … the raincoat with the upturned collar.” Antonio’s gesture is important, as he re-enacts the imitation of Bogart they engaged in as boys, lifting an imaginary cigarette to his lips and turning up his imaginary collar. As Marlene Hillmer notes, “we can slip into the role of Marlene, Humphrey, Audrey, James, speaking their language with our bodies. We are the copy, the variation, the improvisation, the parody” (quoted in Street, 2001: 8). Women, too, engage in this bodily imitation: Luciana (born 1943, from Turin) uses her hands to replicate how as girls they imitated Audrey Hepburn’s hairstyle, and Maria (born 1931, 348

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from a small town in Puglia) makes a similar movement as she explains how she wore the “zucchetto,” or small hat popularized by Gloria Swanson. Maria also makes a clear hand movement to describe her memory of Veronica’s Lake’s distinctive fringe. These gestures are what Kendon (2004: 1000) terms “iconic”: that is, they “display in the form and manner of their execution aspects of the same concrete scene that is presented in speech.” Another powerful form of embodied memory emerges through the topographical. As Kuhn (2002: 17) writes, “memory not only has a topography, it is a topography; and the site of production of place-memories is the lived body, the body which traces out the scenes of memory. Memory, in this view, is at once emplaced and embodied.” This is particularly evident when interviewees talk about both the cinema space and its location or place. ­Daniela (born in 1945, from a small mountain village in Piedmont) uses hand gestures to aid her description of the splendid Lux cinema that she occasionally visited with her parents in Turin, gesturing in an arc with her hand and raising her eyes to the ceiling as if to re-enact her impressionable child self ’s first encounter with that space. She also uses hand gestures to describe the habitual movement from her home to the local cinema and back, along a distinctive pine tree-lined avenue that she enjoyed walking along in anticipation of the film and afterwards in discussion with her friends. We see how Kuhn’s “mental topographies of familiar remembered territory” are re-enforced through gesture, and how walking in particular “assumes an embodied, kinetic quality” (2002: 34). Other respondents use hand gestures similarly, to describe the cloud of smoke that filled the cinemas, or the seats of the cinema that flipped up and down, re-inscribing the repeated physical encounter between space and body.13 In the resurfacing of these memories, we can see how embodied memory, the result of regular, repeated physical practices (such as walking), defines the very m ­ emories that emerge. This explains why the experience of the place of the cinema itself has become so much more important than the films themselves, as clearly emerges from both our ­v ideo-interviews and written questionnaires. Such embodied memories concerning stars and place are made visible in part because, as Lynn Abrams (2010: 142) reminds us, performance is “implicit in every interview” in the collation of oral history. In the case of older people, she suggests, there may even be “a more elemental role for performance in the oral history encounter. It is a means by which they can become visible and attract attention to themselves” (Abrams, 2010: 142). This performative dimension is particularly evident in the interviewees’ deployment of the anecdotal, their self-presentation, and a range of self-conscious behaviors about the processes of remembering and their memories themselves. While our interviewer has underlined that he did not perceive a difference between talking to the interviewees prior to switching on the camera and then during the formal interview, they did often ask at the end of the interview how they had “done.” We would therefore suggest that the entire encounter is a form of performance, with a particular intergenerational and gendered dimension (our Italian male interviewer was in his early 40s). In reading how star memories and a sense of place are mapped onto the body, we can see how the performative qualities required of the interview bring forth specific dimensions of memory. Other performative elements of memory that recur across our interviews relate particularly to the performance of gender and the intervention of time. The story-telling mode is one in which the performative quality of these interviews ­becomes particularly marked. Abrams observes how “many respondents will narrate ­pre-prepared or composed stories that enable them to assume narrative competence and authority” (Abrams, 2010: 151). These kinds of narrative authority can assume particular gendered dimensions that reflect Judith Butler’s interpretation of gender as “a set of repeated acts within a highly rigid regulatory frame that congeal over time to produce the appearance 349

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of substance, of a natural sort of being” (Butler, 1990: 33). Antonio (born in 1941, from ­Puglia) introduces his anecdote as something precisely rehearsed and repeated: “this is s­omething I’m always saying,” a comment directed to someone other than the interviewer off-screen. Straying from the topic of 1950s cinema, but expanding on the question of c­ inematic ­influence, he quotes an exchange from Body Heat (Ladd/Warner Bros., 1981) and the chat-up line suggested to him by the dialogue: – “Can I talk to you? – I am a married woman – I’ll talk to you anyway, because if you didn’t want me to you would have said a happily married woman,” he explains: “this is a scenario I’ve used ever since.” Like many of his comments, this anecdote, told in a mode of male bonding, is accompanied by laughter, which underlines his role as seductive entertainer, and throws his confident assumption of a gendered identity into a playful, proactive key. It is also a mode of imaginative and active engagement with the male star (William Hurt) that echoes in some ways the examples discussed earlier. A hint at the act of rehearsal or repetition that underlies performance allows us to gain access here to the ways in which the performance of memories creates strata of gendered behavior, that sediment over time, integrating film into the fabric of the masculine self. By contrast, we find that laughter is used very differently in the most common female anecdotal mode, which relates to the embodied experience of the under-examined issue of molestation that most of our female interviewees recount as a regular feature of their cinemagoing memories. Maria (born in 1931, from Puglia) for example, recounts her own resourceful response to the repeated problem of unwelcome physical attention in the cinema. Repeating the gesture with her own hands, she would both take a pin to the cinema to respond quickly and effectively to any “mano morta”-“dead” or wandering hands. Another respondent, Carmela, born in 1946, from small-town Sicily, laughingly recounts hearing that her mother’s friend did the same. There is a similar pleasure here in recounting a personal anecdote, but while the male interviewee uses laughter to invite the (male) listeners into complicity with the story, the female narrator uses laughter defensively; she enjoys narrating her own resourcefulness, but also deliberately lightens the tone of any potential allusion to gender oppression and sexual impropriety that the narrative carries with it, particularly for a male listener. Sometimes interviewees of both genders feel less able to mobilize this lightness of tone when discussing such episodes, and are visibly uncomfortable, an aspect which confirms Nancy Huggett’s (2007: 261–262) distinction between narratives related to feelings of shame that “disrupt the easy conversational flow of narratives and cause discomfort and discomposure” and embarrassing stories, which “are disclosed intentionally, as part of a deliberate narrative strategy that draws interviewer and interviewee together over a shared sense of empathy and humour.” In her study of self-presentation in oral history interviews on cinemagoing, Huggett suggests that for women “self-disclosure is more common than in interviews conducted with men and humour tends to be self-directed with women telling embarrassing tales against themselves while men tell humorous stories about others.” Huggett’s (2007: 264) conclusions, however, arise from interviews with a female interviewer, with whom female interviewees might be more likely to adopt “co-operative narrative strategies” and seek out common ground. In the context of our male interviewer, we might suggest that men tend to tell humorous stories about their triumphant interactions with others. For example, when one male interviewee raises the issue of molestation, it is to recount a supposedly amusing episode in which he defended a girl being molested by slapping the aggressor. Thus, while our video interviews confirm Huggett’s suggestion that there is a distinction between modes of self-presentation across genders, they also suggest how the anecdotal may be used by both genders to present the self as heroic protagonist in the context of humor. For men this may 350

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have a more proactive, boastful quality, while for women being interviewed by a man it is an attempt to handle a potentially difficult moment, in which they use laughter to circumvent any admission of their vulnerability. This can tell us much about how the issue of molestation in the Italian cinemagoing experience has remained an awkward experience, for which a common interpretive framework is still missing. Laughter is also often used as a marker of embarrassment over the breakdown in the ­performance itself. More often than not interviewees laugh at their own difficulties in remembering as they pause to recapture distant memories, while more awkward traces of nerves manifest in eye movement, or glances off-screen and the downcast gaze. This kind of self-­ consciousness also extends towards the nature of the memories themselves. The a­ udio–visual narrative can tell us more about how the interviewees anticipate their listeners’ interpretation of their memories. We can see how smiles often accompany memories about childhood beliefs, such as not knowing the cinema was a fiction, and practices, like playing truant from school. In this way interviewees demonstrate their fond distance from these beliefs and p­ ractices. There is also mirth about fandom and admiration, and other kinds of affective response, such as tears. Many of our respondents comment on the famous series of “strappalacrime” or tearjerkers starring the famous screen couple of Italian melodrama, Yvonne ­Sanson and Amedeo Nazzari, almost always mentioning this powerful affective response with laughter or a smile. As Teresa Brennan (2004: 119) writes, “the illusion of self-containment is purchased at the price of dumping negative affects on that other”; hence, we might suggest that in order to count as a “contemporary Italian” in front of their younger interviewer this affective response to what is perceived to be an old-fashioned and critically abject genre has to be dumped onto a past self via laughter. Thus, the deployment of laughter provides us with insight as to how canon formation has subsequently affected the relationship between personal taste and identity. In fact, some interviewees seem to have distanced themselves from their past popular tastes in order to conform to what they perceive to be the current national cinematic taste. Along the same lines, Maria (age 69, from Bari province), recounts with laughter that she has discovered later in life the value of Italian cinema – especially Neorealism – over Hollywood. As in the case of other participants, this awareness seems to have contributed to their appropriation of a canonized discourse on Italian cinematic culture.

Conclusion What analyzing the video interview tells us about the relationship between memory and cinemagoing is that the embodied and performative dimensions of memory structure the way in which cinemagoing becomes part of identity. The examples provided in this chapter show how the memories of stars’ appearances and behavior are introjected and reshaped as part of the interviewees’ repertoire of habitual, gendered actions and performance; how the cinema-goers’ habitual interactions with the topography of cinemas shape their memory of the experience itself; how laughter provides insight into the aspects of their cinemagoing experience that reinforce both the socially acceptable and unacceptable dimensions of their identity, particularly along the gendered lines of masculine seduction versus female self-defense. F ­ inally, we have seen how laughter can also provide us with insights into the processes of canon formation itself, whereby participants distance themselves from genres that were popular at the time (like the “tearjerkers”) as they do not have the same critical status as Neorealism. In her identification of the distinction between the “archive” (the written or mediated word) and the “repertoire” (oral and physical performance), Diana Taylor (2003: 20) suggests that “the video is part of the archive; what it represents is part of the repertoire,” 351

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adding that “embodied memory, because it is live, exceeds the archive’s ability to capture it.” While acknowledging both the reductive quality of the video as a process of archival capture and the reductive aspect of our analysis of the video interview, which may threaten to “reduce gestures and embodied practices to narrative description” (Taylor, 2003: 16), we have found that the traces of embodied memory in these interviews challenge T ­ aylor’s distinction between archive and repertoire. At the same time, while this analysis is an ­important feature of our project, we are equally interested in “shifting the focus from written to embodied culture, from the discursive to the performatic,” as emphasized by Taylor (2003: 16) as a means of challenging unequal power structures. Hence, the key ethical question for this project concerns how to enable the preservation and c­ ontextualization of these narratives as videos via digital technology in a way that makes this new ­cinema ­h istory more accessible to the audiences who have made it. Michael Frisch (2006: 102) writes that most audio-visual content is “inaccessible and generally unlistened to and ­u nwatched” because it is “not searchable or browsable in any useful way,” but we have d­ eveloped a way which will make our content accessible through online subtitled extracts from our interviews, organized thematically, drawing on the coding process described above.14 In our current project we have developed an online archive CineRicordi (www.cinericordi. it) that allows users to explore and participate in the material collected in the Italian Cinema Audiences, with the aim of bringing the subjects of our videos into participatory online research.15 If, ­according to Taylor (2003: 19), archival memory typically “succeeds in separating the source of k­ nowledge from the knower,” we would suggest that such new developments in the digital humanities as crowdsourced platforms (Zooniverse or Historypin, for ­example) offer to bridge the gap between “archive” and “repertoire” by allowing the presence of participants to trouble the “supposedly stable objects in the archive” (Taylor, 2003: 20), and participate in their transmission. As a methodological extension of new cinema ­h istory practice, the CineRicordi archive integrates our video-interviews with digitized ­a rtefacts related to cinemagoing and with crowd-sourced collections from individuals’ private archives. The project engages with schools and libraries with the aim of enabling ­d ifferent generations of cinema-goers to take control of their shared cultural heritage, and become the living curators of a virtual archive of the cinemagoing experience, in the process creating a resource for future generations as well as engaging both older and younger generations in the history of Italian cinema and culture.

Notes 1 www.italiancinemaaudiences.org. 2 The recruitment process involved selecting participants in very different ways through both ­random and snowball sampling. Eligible respondents needed to be resident in the location under scrutiny during the period 1945–1960, implying that they were over sixty at the time of the ­survey. A total of 566 women and 448 men completed the questionnaire. Out of 1,043 r­ espondents, 565 were city dwellers while 478 lived in provincial/rural locations; 18 had no formal education, 221 had only attended primary school, 585 had attended secondary education, while only 176 had obtained an undergraduate or a postgraduate degree. 3 The participants in the video interviews were informed of the topics that would be discussed ahead of the interview, but were not given the specific questions. 4 As Rigney (2005: 11) puts it, narratives show “how memories are communicated, circulated and exchanged,” which “allows us to see how collective identities may be (re)defined, through memorial practices, and not merely reflected in them.” 5 For example, one participant praised the project “because visual memories are more special than mere memories” (perché i ricordi visibili sono più speciali che quelli della sola memoria).

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Memories through video-interviews 6 See also Rubin (1999: 6). As one of our participants describes it: “the project gives a very significant meaning to our present” (Il progetto dà un significato molto importante al nostro presente). 7 “…when folk informants are involved, they may be poor in vocabulary but are generally richer in the range of tone, volume, and intonation, as compared to middle-class speakers who have learned to imitate in speech the dullness of writing” (Portelli, 1981: 98). 8 Some of the motifs include place memories, favourite stars, favourite genres, and programming choices. See Frisch (2006: 106), who notes that such tools allow for “mapping complex interview or other data through marking text with a range of researcher-driven observational, thematic, or categorical organisers.” 9 We would like to thank Martin Barker for suggesting this analytical tool. 10 All respondents are identified by their first name. 11 “Fear is expressed and remembered non-verbally, somatically: inside the cinema you cower under the seat or cover your eyes” (Kuhn, 2002: 96). 12 “Affect, at its most anthropomorphic, is the name we give to those forces – visceral forces beneath, alongside or generally other than conscious knowing, vital forces insisting beyond emotion – that can serve to drive us toward movement, toward thought and extension” (Gregg and Seigworth, 2010: 1). 13 The peculiarities of emphatic and extensive use of gestures in Italian culture have been widely ­acknowledged in different contexts and in comparative studies, from Efron (1972) to Müller (2014). 14 In collaboration with Memoro, a nonprofit online initiative which collects and disseminates video recordings of interviews with elderly people (www.memoro.org/). 15 See for example the Europeana 1989 project (www.europeana1989.eu), or the Imperial War ­Museum’s Operation War Diaries (www.operationwardiary.org).

References Abrams, L. (2010) Oral History Theory. London: Routledge. Ahmed, S. (2004) The Cultural Politics of Emotion. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Assmann, J. and Czaplicka, J. (1995) “Collective Memory and Cultural Identity.” New German Critique 65: 125–133. Barker, M. (2009) “Changing lives, Challenging Concepts: Some Findings and Lessons from the Lord of the Rings Project.” International Journal of Cultural Studies 12(4): 375–394 Barker, M. and Mathijs, E. (2007) Watching the Lord of the Rings: Tolkien’s World Audiences. New York, NY: Peter Lang. Brennan, T. (2004) The Transmission of Affect. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Butler, J. (1990) Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York, NY: Routledge. Efron, D. (1972) Gesture, Race and Culture: A Tentative Study of Some of the Spatio-Temporal and “Linguistic” Aspects of the Gestural Behavior of Eastern Jews and Southern Italians in New York City, Living Under Similar as Well as Different Environmental Conditions. The Hague: Mouton. Erll, A. (2008) “Literature, Film and the Mediality of Cultural Memory.” In A. Erll and A. Nünning (eds.) Cultural Memory Studies: An International and Interdisciplinary Handbook (Media and Cultural Memory). Berlin: de Gruyter (pp. 389–398). Friedman, J. (2014) “Oral History, Hermeneutics, and Embodiment.” The Oral History Review 14(2): 290–300. Frisch, M. (2006) “Oral History and the Digital Revolution: Towards a Post-Documentary Sensibility.” In R. Perks and A. Thomson (eds.) The Oral History Reader. London: Routledge (pp. 102–114). Gardner, J. (1984) “Oral History and Video in Theory and Practice.” The Oral History Review 12: 105–111. Gregg, M. and Seigworth, G. (2010) “An Inventory of Shimmers.” In M. Gregg and G. Siegworth (eds.) The Affect Theory Reader. Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press (pp. 1–25). Halbwachs, M. (1992) On Collective Memory. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Huggett, N. (2007) “Everyone Was Watching! Strategies of Self-Presentation in Oral Histories of Cinema-Going.” Studies in Australasian Cinema 1(3): 261–274. Kendon, A. (2004) Gesture: Visible Action as Utterance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kuhn, A. (2002) An Everyday Magic: Cinema and Cultural Memory. London: I.B. Tauris. Maltby, R. (2006) “On the Prospect of Writing Cinema History from Below.” Tijdschrift voor Mediageschiedenis 9(2) (December): 74–96.

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Daniela Treveri Gennari et al. McNeill, D. (2000) Language and Gesture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Müller, C. (ed.) (2014) Body – Language – Communication. Berlin: de Gruyter. Murdock, G. and Pink, S. (2005) “Picturing Practices: Visual Anthropology and Media ­Ethnography.” In E. Rothenbuhler and M. Coman (eds.) Media Anthropology. London: Sage (pp. 149–164). Portelli, A. (1981) “The Peculiarities of Oral History.” History Workshop Journal 12(1): 96–107. Portelli, A. (1991) “What Makes Oral History Different?” In The Death of Luigi Trastulli and other ­Stories: Form and Meaning in Oral History. Albany, NY: SUNY Press (pp. 45–58). Portelli, A. (2005) “A Dialogical Relationship. An Approach to Oral History.” Expressions Annual www.swaraj.org/shikshantar/expressions_portelli.pdf [Accessed 28 January 2016] (pp. 1–8). Rigney, A. (2005) “Plenitude, Scarcity and the Circulation of Cultural Memory.” Journal of European Studies 35(1): 11–28. Rubin, D. C. (ed.) (1999) Remembering Our Past. Studies in Autobiographical Memory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Stacey, J. (1994) Star Gazing: Hollywood Cinema and Female Spectatorship. London: Routledge. Street, S. (2001) Costume and Cinema: Dress Codes in Popular Film. London: Wallflower. Taylor, D. (2003) The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural History in the Americas. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Yow, V. R. (1994) Recording Oral History: A Practical Guide for Social Scientists. London: Sage.

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28 Social sense and embodied sensibility Towards a historical phenomenology of filmgoing Stephen Putnam Hughes This chapter reflects upon how we might develop a more phenomenological approach for the historical study of social experience at the cinema. To do this, I will consider some recent scholarship and a few examples drawn from my own research on the history of cinema exhibition in south India during the early decades of the twentieth century to suggest several possible starting points for writing a historical phenomenology of filmgoing. On the most general level, I want to encourage more attention on the cinemagoing experience as a complex play between you, me, them, the film, the place of exhibition and the wider world beyond (Breakwell and Hammond, 1990). Certainly, historians of cinema need to be much more attentive to the sensory texture of the past and to ask phenomenological questions of our source materials that can help us relearn how to do history using our senses. However, for the purposes of this chapter, I will focus on one aspect of this sensory history of cinema that has all too often been overlooked, namely how embodied sensibility went together with the social sense of being part of an audience. Before moving on to specific examples I will first explain my focus on social sense and how this relates to phenomenology. There is a part of watching a film within the shared space of a theatrical setting, almost too obvious to mention, that involves variable degrees of awareness of being in a collective. Even though films take center stage and often work to blind us to everything else going on around their projection, filmgoers nonetheless also routinely experience other filmgoers. There is always a jostling proximity of bodies within touching and smelling distances of each other. This embodied social sense is a fundamental part of filmgoers’ experience of themselves as being part of an audience while watching films. However, this social aspect of cinema experience has all too often been overlooked in what is now a substantial body of historical work on the relationship between audiences and cinema. In several recent contributions, theorist Julian Hanich (2010: 2014) has urged cinema studies scholars to pay more attention to the phenomenology of the collective viewing experience. Hanich argues that film scholars have tended to focus upon the relationship between viewer and film at the expense of the relationship between viewer and viewer. Citing Miriam Hansen (1991) on the cinematic public sphere and Janet Staiger (1992) on the history of film reception (amongst others), Hanich (2010: 4) notes that their approach was limited by an objective t­ hird-person perspective on communal viewing situations without consideration of accompanying phenomenological 355

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aspects of audience interrelations. He also acknowledges the work of new cinema historians as helping to shift the agenda from individual movies-as-artefacts or as texts to consider a broader conception of the social experience of cinemagoing (Hanich, 2014: 338, 343). In this regard, he cites the work of Richard Maltby, Melvyn Stokes, Annette Kuhn, Philippe Meers, and Robert C. Allen as usefully highlighting the social significance of watching film. Yet, Hanich also complains that new cinema history needs to take a further step to embrace a phenomenological approach for the study of cinema’s social collectivities. I believe that Hanich is, up to a point, correct on this issue. New cinema historians have not made phenomenology an explicit theoretical move. However, Hanich also underestimates the extent to which new cinema history scholarship has at least implicitly been informed by and is ­compatible with phenomenology. For example, Maltby’s introduction to the e­ dited ­volume ­Explorations in New Cinema History identifies social experience as a central question (2011). L ­ ikewise, Allen’s contribution to the same volume distilled the lessons learned over a 29-year research project on cinema history in North Carolina into a renewed call to f­ocus our a­ ttention on the sociality and spatiality of the experience of cinema (2011: 48). This same d­ iscernible, yet still implicit, phenomenological emphasis on social experience can also be found in Kuhn’s book, An Everyday Magic (2002). Though primarily highlighting the work of memory, Kuhn’s project amassed an extremely rich set of first-person accounts of cinema ­experience in 1930s ­Britain which speak directly to the embodied sensibilities of communal viewing. Clearly, leading figures of new cinema history have already been exploring common ground with a tradition of phenomenological scholarship, even without explicitly acknowledging it per se. There may well be good reasons why new cinema historians have not made the explicit move towards phenomenology while exploring the social aspects of cinema experience. Following the work of Edmund Husserl and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, phenomenology started as a philosophical endeavor that privileged the embodied, subjective, and lived experience as the necessary starting point for understanding human practice. This tradition has in many ways tended to privilege an individualistic approach that begins at the point of subjective perception. Within film studies, Vivian Sobchack (1992, 2004) has, more than any other scholar, helped to bring this phenomenological tradition into the discussion of how film studies theorized spectatorship. Through a new emphasis on the embodied, sensory experience of films, Sobchack’s philosophical intervention significantly altered the terms of debate about how people make sense of the cinema. Yet, her analysis has largely been aimed at the level of an abstract individual. While it is important to acknowledge the significance of ­Sobchack’s critique of the implicit mind/body dualism in spectator studies, her work has not led others to build on this opening to examine the social experience of cinema with the tools of phenomenology. Film studies’ theorization of a film spectatorship that is always caught up in textual strategies that position filmgoers and produce their subjectivity will not get us very far in being able to account for the theatrical social experience of cinema. However, if we can agree with Sobchack that films mobilize a differential extension of the senses amongst their spectators, then we must also explore how film exhibition practices marshal audience experience as part of their own complex sensory, aesthetic, emotional, and social environments. Though phenomenology has been strongly associated with and sometimes criticized for an individualistic emphasis (Pink and Howes, 2010; Spiegelberg, 2012), it would be wrong to dismiss the approach on this basis. Phenomenologists have also stressed the importance of constitutive, intersubjective, and interactional processes that bring people into worlds of shared meaning. For example, the work of the philosopher Alfred Schutz (1944, 1967) on what he referred to as “social phenomenology” was a sustained effort over decades to explore how phenomenologists could approach an understanding of the collective shared experience 356

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of social groups. Schutz’ project was a highly detailed and exacting analysis of how the interior of experience goes together with the exteriority of social relations. On this account, intersubjectivity and the raft of social relations it entails becomes a key concept for developing a phenomenological understanding. Hanich’s phenomenological challenge picks up on this focus on intersubjectivity as an ever-present part of the cinema experience, even if we are not always aware of it. In putting forward his theory of collective spectatorship Hanich has argued that a quiet attentive audience predominantly experiences cinema without reflexively experiencing each other. Though filmgoers are always to some extent aware of being in a collective, Hanich emphasizes that the viewer’s conscious experience of co-present others remains for the most part at the margins of their consciousness. Nonetheless, even without having an awareness of others at the forefront of a viewer’s attention, the quiet attentive watching of a film is still a ­collectively shared activity (Hanich, 2014: 341). This point is especially important for H ­ anich because he says there has been a tendency for historians to celebrate and overemphasize the more expressive, boisterous, and distracted mode of collective viewing at the expense of the quiet attentive audience. Hanich probably makes a valid theoretical point that historians have not placed as much emphasis on the quiet audience. However, the crucial difference between Hanich’s theoretical exercise and the work of a historian (or an anthropologist for that matter) is for the latter no general theory of audiences would be advanced a priori for all people and places without empirical research of some kind. It may seem reasonable to assume that in theory a quietly attentive audience is the normative, taken-for-granted, unreflective social sense of filmgoing. But doing so misses out on how the immediate setting and occasion of any given film exhibition bares upon the embodied social sense of the cinema. Historians would, in general, want to turn this normative assumption around into historically contingent and culturally specific research questions. Scholars have taken up these questions of the cinema experience in a variety of research settings and repeatedly found that quiet attentive audiences are not necessarily the norm. Working in northern Rhodesia (now Zambia) in the 1960s Hortense Powdermaker (1966) found mining laborers to be highly expressive filmgoers. Likewise, Elizabeth Hahn (1994) has written about film screenings in Tonga as raucous events of intense audience participation. Walter Armbrust (1998) described moviegoing in downtown Cairo as a secular ritual that verged on the carnivalesque. And perhaps most relevant for my own research interests in India, the recent work by Lakshmi Srinivas (2016: 3) has argued that “the voluble cinema hall audience and an in-theater experience marked by a spontaneity, improvisation, and performance that is far removed from the silent absorption of film associated with mainstream audiences in Anglo-American and Western European exhibition settings.” In light of this body of scholarship from very different settings, Hanich’s privileging of the quietly attentive audience may well appear to be a Eurocentric blind spot. Certainly, we need to be attentive to the cultural diversities of audience experience. However, we also want to be careful not to reify active and passive audiences as diametrically opposed cinema experiences that fall into a simplistic west versus the rest or high-class and low-class dichotomies. In what follows, I consider some common ways that the embodied social sense of filmgoing was experienced within cinema theaters using examples that mostly derive from my research on the south Indian city of Madras (now known as Chennai) during the first decades of the twentieth century (Hughes, 2001, 2010, 2011). In order to examine some of the ways that a heightened social sense was brought to the forefront of cinema experience, I distinguish three main kinds of embodied social sense at the cinema. First (in no order of priority) is the mundane, routinely taken-for-granted part of theatrical filmgoing that 357

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involves a collectivity of people. A second kind of social sense was deliberately organized as promotional activities and competitions whereby exhibitors actively involved audience members to take part in the show before, after or in between films. The third kind of social sense at the cinema was produced by unplanned and spontaneous incidents where audiences variously distracted, interrupted, interfered, or upstaged the screening of films.

Collective encounters in the dark Roland Barthes spoke of his social sense of cinema as a kind of ghostly presence illuminated by the flickering lights of film projection. In his short essay “Leaving the Movie Theater” (1989), he wrote evocatively about his own cinemagoing experience as part of an effort to assess the political possibility of freeing the spectator from the grasp of the spectacle. He argued that the experience of going to the cinema was as much about what goes on in the darkness of the auditorium as about the film itself. Thus, under cover of darkness, surrounded by the shadowy company of strangers, “Barthes remarks on the postures of the spectators in the darkness, often with their coats or legs draped over the seat in front of them, their bodies sliding down into their seats as if they were in bed” (Burgin, 1996: 163). For Barthes, this was a kind of diffuse social eroticism that piqued his distracted and surreptitious interest in those seated around him. This twilight communion was made all the more fascinating by the light from the projector which not only illuminated images on the screen, but also the crowd from the back of their heads. Rather than being momentarily hypnotized by the film, completely engulfed in the narrative, filmgoers in a darkened auditorium are also involved in their architectural and social surroundings. Barthes (1989: 345) explains that it was as if I had two bodies at the same time: the narcissistic body which looks, lost in the close mirror, and the perverse body, ready to fetishize, not the image, but precisely that which exceeds it: the grain of the sound, the theater itself, the darkness, the obscure mass of other bodies, the rays of light, the entrance, the exit. Barthes did not explicitly pursue this observation as a matter of phenomenology. But, the perverse body that he described as having come unstuck from the imaginary in the movie theater was the embodied historical subject sensuously embedded within a set of physical, material, emotional, and social relations. In thinking about the limits of the filmic medium, Barthes stumbled bleary eyed into the phenomenological realm of the extra-cinematic. And he left us hanging there without trying to make sense of this excess. For my purposes here, this is a good example of the habitual commonplace sociality that so often goes without mention in historical accounts and sources on filmgoing and aligns with Hanich’s (2014) concern with the quiet attentive audience sociality.

Stage-managed sociality A second kind of social sense at the cinema was orchestrated by cinema managers in an explicit effort to try to get their patrons more involved with their film shows. These most often took the form of promotional activities and competitions. A 1924 article in a leading English daily newspaper in Madras entitled “Fairground of the Film” explained how cinema audiences had become a key part of the attraction of the theatrical setting (Madras Mail, 5 April 1924: 8). The article was very clear on this point: “The picture goer has become an exhibit; he has taken the 358

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place of the Fat Boy of Peckham.” The “Fat Boy” here refers to John Trunley (1898–1944) from what was then a suburb of London, who gained fame for reaching an unusually heavy weight at a young age and went on to perform in music halls and in films. The “Fairground of Film” article suggested that shrewd exhibitors had already figured out audiences came to watch themselves as much as anything else. To help capitalize on the attraction of the audience exhibitors came up with various competitions and promotions that made “the audience part of the show, so that still more may stand and gape at the gates” (Madras Mail, 5 April 1924: 8). Film exhibitors in Madras used a variety of promotional practices often themed as a kind of tie-in with a specific film and/or leading screen actor where audience members were invited to participate in contests against each other. Such schemes were numerous: filmgoers were encouraged to write descriptions of leading actors, speak on the moral values of a film, to recognize isolated scenes in a film and put them in their proper order, act out key scenes and to come up with new endings or with alternate titles. It was common for audience members to be invited on stage as contest participants or winners in what amounted to a kind of talent show where audiences could appreciate each other as performers in their own, alongside the films. As the “Fairground of the Film” article put it, “Competitions are showered upon the happy client.” This kind of active audience involvement in the show helped to heighten and encourage filmgoers’ awareness of themselves as an attraction.

Performative disruption The third kind of social sense at the cinema was the product of unplanned and spontaneous incidents where audiences variously distracted, interrupted, interfered, or upstaged the screening of films. This kind of social sense at the cinema is by far the best represented in my historical sources from Madras. Any sudden, unexpected, persistent, or dramatic eruption of loud and participatory audience reactions within the theatrical space of the cinema produced collective audience responses. Such incidents provide key moments where filmgoers imposed their presence as part of the show and in so doing became aware of themselves as being interactive, spontaneous, performative, and sometimes antagonistic. They helped filmgoers sit up and take notice of themselves as something more than mute witnesses absorbed in watching films. The social experience of being part of a cinema audience involved different sensibilities and styles of film appreciation thrown together in a darkened and confined place. From my historical sources, I have found that accounts written about loud interactive incidents serve as a kind of auto-ethnography of how cinema audiences came to understand their own collective social experience. This kind of embodied social sense of filmgoing is an important constituent of what Hanich (2010: 2) has referred to as “affective audience interrelations.” Already by the 1920s, there seems to have been a common and well-rehearsed crowd response to the apparently not infrequent technical hitches in the smooth running of a film show. In the words of a newspaper correspondent who described an incident where there was a cut in the electrical supply: They yell, whistle, and shout as soon as the picture fades and the lights fails from the screen and keep up their outcry, often accompanied by more active demonstrations until the light comes on again, or some other means of illumination is found. (Madras Mail, 19 February 1921) The correspondent was writing from his own experience as a member of the audience at the event, even though he adopted a third-person voice to describe it for newspaper readers. 359

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The strong emotions on display during the incident moved the writer to express his own social sense of the situation. He speculated that even though such boisterous and interactive scenes might seem to pose a general threat to public order, it was probably due to a more harmless fear of the dark. The loud shouting, whistling, and outcry was thus got rationalized and explained away by a fear of the dark in a manner that also betrayed the author’s overriding sense of amusement. For my argument, the predictable audience reaction to a power outage is a clear and reoccurring example of how at the flip of a switch the social sense of filmgoing took center stage and a communal expression of strong feelings helped to create a heightened, if only transient, moment of togetherness. Another common talking point about disruptive events in Madras cinemas was the frequent incidence of audience intervention during the screening of a film, – ranging from incidental conversations unrelated to the film to pointed commentary aimed at what was on screen. We only know about these interjections because they were written about by commentators in a manner that suggests a mix of annoyance and amusement. Vocal outbursts, chatting, and other such interventions would have punctured audience attention on the screen or, in Barthes’ terms, unstuck the spectator from the imaginary by insisting on the here and now of the historically located and embodied filmgoer. However, these audience interjections were also in themselves a kind of performance of an extra cinematic social scene that was a regular part of the experience of cinema. The chair of the Indian Cinematic Committee of 1927–1928, T. Rangachari, recounted a story about the behavior and reactions of what he described as lower-class film audiences in Madras. Rangachari, who was a lawyer from Madras, drew on his own first-hand experience as a film goer who personally visited most of the cinema halls in the Madras as part of the official investigation. On one evening, he watched an “old-fashioned serial” at the Liberty Cinema, which he described as “a cheap theater in Madras”: The white heroine in every reel was being persecuted by a cosmopolitan band of v­ illains whose leader was an Oriental and whose rank and file comprised other Orientals. Whenever the white hero made a timely appearance or the heroine escaped from the toils, spontaneous applause broke forth and on one occasion when the screen showed the heroine about to fall in the hands or her Oriental persecutor an excited voice cried out in Tamil “Look out Miss, look out!” (Government of India, 1928: 111–112) Unlike most accounts of vocal outbursts, Rangachari did not seem to be the least bit annoyed at the disturbance and accepted it as a commonplace occurrence. As he moved from a first-person experience to a third-person analysis in the retelling of the incident, he framed the film screening according his own social sensibility. He argued that this incidence showed uneducated Indians could easily follow the narrative plot, even sometimes more quickly than educated audiences. For Rangachari, even lower-class Indian audiences could fully understand action serials when the films appealed to basic human emotions. Indian audiences were able to “see the play enacted before their eyes, and to partake vicariously in the emotions of the p­ layers [on the screen]” (Government of India, 1928: 111). This affective bond ­a llowed Indians to identify with the white heroes and despise the “Oriental” villains within the moral ­economy of the action serial film. For my argument, it is important to point out that ­Rangachari’s reading of Indian audiences’ emotional involvement with the content of the film was itself triggered by his social sensibility in the theatrical setting. The well-timed vocal i­nterjection catalyzed his own social perception of a moment of collective emotion of the filmgoing 360

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experience. The interjection prompted Rangachari to shift his focus to the ­extra-cinematic social scene, so that in his account, the interactive and inter-racial relationships between a vocal Tamil audience member and the Hollywood action film serial were rendered as ­co-constituents in a conjoined performance. Rangachari’s explanation suggests how audience interactivity with the screen helped to express a shared affective social sensibility. As already eluded to in previous paragraphs, class was a key social register of the filmgoing experience (also see Chatterjee, 2012; Dass, 2016: 91–97). Most of the commentary from my 1920s sources was couched in terms that betrayed a snobbish concern for maintaining an “orderly, well- behaved house” (Madras Mail, 11 June 1921: 8) that explicitly targeted the “rowdy element” of the “cheaper seats” in the front. For example, a short newspaper notice under the title “Noisy Audiences” complained: It is a pity that something cannot be done to induce the masses who frequent Madras cinemas to conduct themselves with a little less noise. At times one would believe that pandemonium had been let loose in the lower priced seats to hear the shouting, whistling and cat-calling that takes place there. (Madras Mail, 15 October 1921: 10) Noisy audiences were implicitly judged in comparison to the “orderly, well-behaved” patrons in the more expensive seats above and behind them. Within the theatrical space of the cinema, audience social experience involved both a self-awareness of one’s class, gender, and racial identity as well as kind of social performance of those distinctions. Accounts about others’ behavior at the cinema were very much part of this performative social enactment of distinction. The dominant discursive trope about the alternatives of the active and passive, loud and silent audiences were most often portrayed as a showdown between the masses and the classes. However, the negative social commentary against disruptive talking and sociality were not always limited to the lower-class Indian cinema patrons. On occasion those occupying the upper stalls also came in for sharp criticism for their own bad “cinema manners.” In a letter to a newspaper editor using the pen name “Disgusted” wrote: Sir, I cannot understand why some men and women who occupy the best seats at the Cinema think that it is quite the right and proper place to discuss their domestic and Club life and chatter all through the show to the utter disgust of those who have paid to be entertained or amused. No one objects to a few remarks (sotto voce) but some people who patronize the cinema think it the best of good form to drawl out their remarks about the film or read out aloud the matter projected on the screen and discuss domestic matters in a high-pitched voice so that their audience may be impressed by their importance and know how many are lunching with them next day and so on and so forth. If these people could see and hear themselves as others do they would not sin again, but unfortunately they are blind to their own faults and cannot see how ridiculous they make themselves. (Madras Mail, 20 April 1924: 4) This comment suggests that elite European filmgoers used the cinema for socializing in a manner that had little or no relation to what was going on in the film and without ­self-awareness or regard for those around them who wished to watch a film quietly. ­“Disgusted”’s annoyance was not merely about the disturbance, but how this chattering class performed their own privilege through their indifference of others. 361

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The marked annoyance with noisy filmgoers disrupting the possibility of a quiet and attentive atmosphere in both these last two examples may have been aimed at opposite ends of the social hierarchy, but they nonetheless shared a common cause of reforming public cinema manners. For my purposes here, I want to bracket the explicit disciplinary intent of this commentary to draw our attention to a fleeting glimpse of an important experiential social sense of film-going implicitly revealed in these quotations. Madras cinema theaters created a social space where the experience of filmgoing as a group encounter juxtaposed widely divergent social classes in close proximity for over two hours at a time. Cinema shows brought different social aesthetics together and spatially materialized them from top to bottom as different seating classes, which literally allowed the elite to look down on those down in the front on benches. In this sense filmgoing was, in addition to everything else it might be, also a chance to participate in a public performance of class and racial hierarchy. Even though many of the first-person accounts of filmgoing spoke about the experience of social differences, cinema nonetheless also produced its own kind of affective social ties that offered moments that transcended these differences. The class diversity on show at the cinema also produced powerful moments of collective feeling that was not disruptive. For example, the newspaper correspondent for the Madras Times described such a moment when the British film Twelve-Ten (1919, British & Colonial Kinematograph Company) was screened at the Gaiety Theater: “No film play has ever worked me up so much as this one,” was the remark I overheard at the Gaiety Theater last week … So tense does the atmosphere become towards the end of the fifth part that it is no exaggeration to say that one could hear a pin drop in the theater … but what pleased me more about this visit was the keen interest of the crowd in the cheaper seats in the production. (Madras Times, 18 February 1922: 9) Silence, in this case, was an audible phenomenon that communicated a common interest in the film (Hanich, 2014: 347). This affective communal response is what Hanich (2012) has spoken about in another context as a double aesthetic response. This occurs when an individual becomes self-aware and self-affirmed by an affective lived body experience within a collective group encounter of shared emotions responding to the same aesthetic object in a theatrical setting. But in this case, we also see the correspondent’s recognition of how an especially intense moment of drama rendered the stereotypically noisy patrons of the cheaper seats into a quietly attentive audience. The so-called “classes and masses” were brought together as one in the shared communal emotions of dramatic suspense. The correspondent’s social sense of class difference was overcome by the emotional “co-presence” between participants, which at least briefly engendered feelings of solidarity and commonality. These descriptions of audience behavior reflect an awareness of oneself and others in an intersubjective embrace. That is, there was an ambiguous and shifting sense that audience experience involved both social diversity and communal togetherness. --In posing a historical phenomenology of cinema experience, we do not have to pretend to be able to somehow mysteriously reconstitute the subjective experience of filmgoing in the past. We will never have any unmediated access to some autonomous or unified consciousness of these filmgoers apart from our institutional and discursive sources. The task, instead, 362

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becomes a matter of how we go about using historical sources to find the elusive trace of filmgoers’ experience of each other as a collectivity within the social spaces of cinema at sites of exhibition. I outlined a series of examples drawn from my research to show how social sense was articulated in theatrical settings of cinema in Madras. If, as Barthes claimed, films create a “festival of affect” (1989: 376), then the collective experience and forms of intersubjectivity amongst audiences at cinema theaters are another kind of festival – a festival of fascination with people and place. The fragments from my research about film audiences and their critics suggest that, contrary to normative expectations, the cinema experience was contested and dynamic, laden with the possibility of multiple aesthetic sensibilities at work within the theater spaces. Though some filmgoers may well have preferred to lose themselves within a film ­narrative, theater sociality routinely dominated cinema experience (Larkin, 1998: 47; ­Srinivas, 2016: 187). Moreover, easy contrasts between active and passive, quiet and loud audiences are not an either/or proposition. Both kinds of aesthetic sensibility fed off each other in a kind of push and pull of ever present social possibilities on any given outing to the cinema. Both were part of the routine ways that cinemagoers both performed and reflexively experienced themselves as being audiences.

References Armbrust, W. (1998) “When the Lights Go Down in Cairo: Cinema as Secular Ritual.” Visual Anthropology 10(2–4): 413–442. Barthes, R. (1989) “Leaving the Movie Theater,” In R. Howard (ed.) The Rustle of Language. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press (pp. 345–349). [originally published in 1975 as “En sortant du cinema.” Communications 23(1): 104–107.] Breakwell, I. and Hammond, P. (eds.) (1990) Seeing in the Dark: A Compendium of Cinemagoing. London: Serpents Tail. Burgin, V. (1996) In/Different Spaces: Place and Memory in Visual Culture. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Chatterjee, R. (2012) “Cinema in the Colonial City: Early Film Audiences in Calcutta.” In I. ­Christie (ed.) Audiences: Defining and Researching Screen Entertainment Reception. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press (pp. 66–80). Dass, M. (2016) Outside the Lettered City: Cinema, Modernity, & the Public Sphere in Late Colonial India. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Government of India (1928) Evidence of the Indian Cinematograph Committee, 1927–1928. New Delhi: Government of India Press. Hahn, E. (1994) “The Tongan Tradition of Going to the Movies.” Visual Anthropology Review 10(1): 103–111. Hanich, J. (2010) “Collective Viewing.” Passions in Context: The Journal for the History and Theory of Emotions 1(1): 1–18. Hanich, J. (2012) “Cinematic Shocks: Recognition, Aesthetic Experience, and Phenomenology.” Amerikastudien/American Studies 574: 581–602. Hanich, J. (2014) “Watching a Film with Others: Towards a Theory of Collective Spectatorship.” Screen 55(3): 338–359. Hansen, M. (1991) Babel & Babylon: Spectatorship in American Silent Film. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Hughes, S. P. (2001) “Policing Silent Film Entertainment in Colonial South India.” In R. Vasudevan (ed.) Making Meaning in Indian Cinema. New Delhi: Oxford University Press (pp. 39–64). Hughes, S. P. (2010) “When Film Came to Colonial Madras.” Bioscope: South Asian Screen Studies 1(2): 147–169. Hughes, S. P. (2011) “Film Genre, Exhibition and Audiences in Colonial South India.” In R. Maltby, D. Biltereyst, and Ph. Meers (eds.) Explorations in New Cinema History: Approaches and Case Studies. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell (pp. 295–309).

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29 “It Pays to Plan ’em!” The newspaper movie directory and the paternal logic of mass consumption Paul S. Moore

“‘How did we ever do without the movies?’ is the universal comment as dad brings his delighted brood home from the show.” This scenario opened a 1922 quarter-page advertisement in The Cleveland Plain Dealer, labeled an Early Buying Bulletin (EBB) and headlined “Tonight’s Movie” (EBB, No. 6, 15 January 1922). The ad copy anchored an illustration of a trio of children surrounding their mother as she sat in an easy chair reading a newspaper. The ad was selling the newspaper itself, in particular the movie directory for its capacity to help plan an evening’s entertainment. The steps before going to the movie were depicted – two daughters looked over mom’s shoulder at the movie directory while a young son awaited their choice, poised with mother’s hat and coat in hand. But then father – curiously absent from the illustration – got to speak the last word on the way home after the show: “How did we ever do without the movies?” Why was father the one asking this rhetorical question, when he was not apparent in the planning at home? In the context of a patriarchal family using the movies to bridge public and private spheres, was the expression of wonderment and excitement only elevated to a “universal comment” when said by father? Spoken paternally, the question seems to become a statement of the movies as a measure of social progress. Predictable, orderly leisure and amusement at the movies was now, by 1922, an extension of the nuclear family’s middle-class home – central to the ideology of mass consumption and thus at the very center of modernity. Do not mistake the father or the family as the central actor in this story – it’s all about the paper! “Tonight’s Movie” was an early entry in a series of nearly 100 Early Buying ­B ulletins published by The Plain Dealer between January and August 1922, aiming to educate its r­ eaders into being better consumers by using the morning paper’s advertising to plan reflexively (see Figure 29.1). Each of them was a quarter-page advertisement in the paper, although labeled and numbered as a series of flyers instructing readers how to be better shoppers. This particular Bulletin was the first of five addressing the topic of ­movies, which I will review here in detail as a succinct way to analyze the imaginary place that moviegoing had just come to occupy within mass consumption in the United States (Gomery, 1992; May, 1987). In all of them, curiously, it was always the father who decides what to see on behalf of the entire moviegoing family. Allow me, then, to propose another reading of the advertisement’s juxtaposition of mother and children pictured at home

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Figure 29.1 Cleveland Plain Dealer (15 January 1922)

before the show against father speaking truism after the fact: the newspaper itself takes the place of the missing father in the illustration – trusted, reliable, authoritative. Elsewhere, I have argued that newspapers must be central to new cinema history, constituting the mass public and the normative ideals of early moviegoing (Moore, 2011). The viewing audience was always already a reading public (Moore, 2012; Warner, 2002). Movies were premediated by newspapers, which were the primary medium of the early twentieth century, structuring modern knowledge and experience during the emergence of secular, mass consumption (Barth, 1980; Grusin, 2004). The Plain Dealer’s series of Early Buying Bulletins collectively instructed metropolitan newspaper readers how to use the morning newspaper to rationally plan consumption as informed, educated shoppers. Far from austere asceticism, the Early Buying Bulletins offered techniques for intelligently indulging in novel forms of ­m iddle-brow consumption for goods that had only just become relatively common luxuries for the emerging middle class (Leach, 1993; Marchand, 1985). To be sure, these goods were far from universal commodities (Cohen, 2008). But the ideology presented in the series nonetheless corresponds with an actually expanding urban middle class – especially in booming industrial cities like Cleveland – who could consider the topics addressed in the ads, but only if planned and budgeted prudently (Schudson, 1984). The Bulletin’s cloaking of advertised variety as rational choice placed movies squarely in line with the norms of a new consumer society (Lears, 1995; Strasser, 1989). Buying ­Bulletins offered advice for purchasing such items as automobiles, electric appliances, fashionable clothing, stylish furniture, and family vacations, as well as investment banking and interest-bearing savings accounts. Yet, the logic of moviegoing remained distinct from these other forms of consumption and shopping. All five movie-themed Early Buying Bulletins depict an idealized form of moviegoing where the entire family attends together, with an emphasis on father’s responsibility to provide entertainment as an extension of home life. The diversity of the mass public at the picture show is absent, sublimated into the competing interests within the family – each easily satisfied with one part of an intelligently selected show. 366

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There are movies for the flappers who wish to cry their pretty eyes out over a love story. There are funny movies for the little boys, and fairy stories for the little girls. Sometimes these different movies are all in the same movie show. (EBB No. 6, 15 January 1922) Only father was concerned with the cost, time and quality of the show. Early Buying Bulletins assure him of three things: that the movie directory acts as insurance against time wasted at a disappointing show; that money spent wisely at the movies is a means of thrift and saving; and that informed, rational choices transform the novelty and variety of mass culture into the paternal provision of leisure for the family. These points become a generalized role for the morning paper as patron and guide to the movies – and to mass consumption itself.

Newspapers as advance agents for movies Commercial amusements in North America purchased significant daily advertising in newspapers throughout the nineteenth century. Metropolitan newspapers had special advertising columns at higher costs for big city theaters to use daily (Sargent, 1915: 83). For itinerant shows touring to towns and smaller cities, planning (or planting) publicity was the work of “advance agents,” traveling ahead to arrange local contracts and details for the future date when the show itself arrived. Crucial to this work was a stop at local newspaper offices. Their publicity – notes amidst the “town gossip,” advertisements, and news articles alike  – ­effectively constitutes our archive of circuits of commercial amusements (Landro, 2002; Moore, 2011). Similar press work was central to the routines of theater and vaudeville in major cities. Early nickelodeons in metropolitan cities, however, rarely advertised because there was little need or benefit for audiences to plan ahead. Films were short, and interspersed with illustrated songs to make a variety show; posters or “barkers” on downtown sidewalks, or a neighborhood of habitués, sufficed to draw an audience (Fuller-Seeley, 2012). With the emergence of the multiple-reel feature film and the loosening of the monopolistic Patents Trust around 1913, new routines of mainstream moviegoing led film producers to adopt the newspaper’s reliable service of ­promotion (Gaines, 1990; Staiger, 1990). The success of studios’ ­continent-wide ad  campaigns relied upon the concurrent adoption of daily advertising by local picture theaters. Movie advertising and photoplay-themed Sunday pages began in 1913 in many metropolitan newspapers, including The Cleveland Plain Dealer, with just a few earlier exceptions (Abel, 2015; Moore, 2014). Movie-themed feature pages allowed a critical mass of competitors to act collectively as a directory, drawing enough attention overall to ensure that each small ad found its neighborhood public. With the serial film craze in 1914, several film distributors began overt collaborations with newspapers, promoting when and where to see each of the dozen or more episodes, as their stories first appeared in the paper. The film industry distributed movies in multi-tiered runs, geographic zones, and timed clearance policies; serial film advertising effectively created the mass public for movies by instructing disparate audiences on where they stood within the diversity of locations, prices, and classes of movie theaters (Moore, 2008). By 1916, film studios began facilitating publicity in standardized form by issuing lavish press books to exhibitors for local use (Miller, 1994). For example, Paramount’s Artcraft provided a twenty-four-page press book with a catalogue of advertisements of all sizes and styles and “filler” articles for editors to use; also available were selections of posters, lobby cards, billboards, slides, even oil paintings of Mary Pickford for permanent display (“Artcraft Starts Campaign,” 1916). 367

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The first movie directories in Chicago in 1914 were initially linked to daily stories of film. Launched simultaneously in three competing morning papers, the idea was widely syndicated and mimicked on a continental scale (Moore, 2014). Universal Pictures’ stories appeared in The Record-Herald with the tagline to “Read the story in the morning, see it in moving pictures at night.” Pathé pictures had a similar collaboration with Hearst’s American (and his entire chain), while The Chicago Tribune had its own reporter, Kitty Kelly, review “Today’s Best Motion Picture Story” to create an early form of film criticism. Soon afterwards, the idea of a city movie directory was generalized and adopted by nearly all metropolitan morning papers, giving a daily representation of film distributors’ standardized policies and contracts amongst local exhibitors. The Chicago Tribune, for example, called its daily movie directory “a menu that gives you the widest possible range of choice, with something in it to suit every fancy and every mood” (“High Class Motion Picture Theaters,” 1915). The “menu” motif, as Richard Abel (2015) emphasizes, displaced movie-mad culture with consumer choice, a matter of taste and preference rather than appetite and craving. The directory was also a technology of time-saving efficiency, avoiding “the trouble of t­ elephoning the theaters in your neighborhood … and the greater trouble of walking to the different theaters and looking at the billboards” (“Moving Picture Theaters,” 1915). These qualities of variety and efficiency were twinned when The Plain Dealer’s Movie Directory became a daily feature in 1915, carried forward and made explicit in the 1922 Early Buying Bulletins, which went a step further by integrating the logic of the movie directory into a general practice of newspaper-informed consumption.

Advertising, the progressive movie manager “Tonight’s Movie,” and the all of the movie-themed Early Buying Bulletins, largely ignored the extent to which movie advertising and promotion was dependent on standardized ­Hollywood production and distribution. The emphasis was on the local directory and its show times. The ad-buying local showman was singled out as “a progressive movie manager… a merchant whose stock in trade is entertainment and education” (EBB, No. 6, 15 January 1922). Movies were positioned as a modern business and local showmen as following modern management techniques (Chandler, 1977; Zunz, 1992). The Plain Dealer’s Daily Movie Directory, in fact, listed only about 40 shows, a minority of the city’s 140 or so theaters (Dannenberg, 1926: 558–559), including Loew’s, the national chain with a foothold in Cleveland, and regional chains such as M. B. Horwitz’s Washington Circuit or the combination run by J. E. Scoville, P. E. Essick, and Howard Reif. The cost of inclusion in the directory was probably prohibitive for most owners of older, smaller theaters, but it was nonetheless presented as a plentiful selection: “Whether the movie theater is located in one’s own neighborhood or downtown, this Directory is a faithful index to all that’s new or best in the movies, for—they’re all in The Plain Dealer.” This was the final phrase and ad campaign motto for the entire series of Early Buying Bulletins, where readers were “taught the advantage of reading dependable advertising before buying anything—shown how their buying dollar lasts longer, and buys more, when invested in advertised merchandise or service” (EBB, 22 January 1922). The ad claims the movies are the “most inspiring and democratic of all the arts,” subverting the old-fashioned class divide of literature, arts, and education. The most famous movie stars are equated as superseding great artists: “‘Mary and Doug,’ Charley Chaplin and Bill Hart will soon have to compete with the highbrows—and there’s room for all!” 368

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“Tonight’s Movie” notes two examples as evidence of the photoplay’s established credentials. First noted is Sir Gilbert Parker, famous Canadian novelist and British parliamentarian, who had spent time “on location” in California. Parker’s 1920 contract to write original scenarios for Paramount was notable among the gossip columns, where he was quoted saying that “it was a greater honor to have his name on a successful photoplay than to serve fifteen years in the House of Commons” (“Hollywood Hokum,” 1921). The Early Buyer Bulletin also notes the new book by Columbia University professor, Frances Taylor Patterson, Cinema Craftsmanship (1920). Patterson had established photoplay writing within the ivy-league university’s English Department (“Columbia Instructor,” 1920). The book had a chapter on “The Photoplay Market,” which explains in passing the dilemma facing Hollywood in light of its success in becoming the “most democratic of the arts.” Producers were foolish to pursue the “impossible” task of “making pictures which will appeal to a universal audience,” she explained. “The motion picture audience is not a unit. It is made up of people of varied intellectual and social planes” (Patterson, 1920: 160). The diversity of the audience had to be taken into account. Pictures often failed financially because of “the failure to get the right pictures to the right people… The solution is a simple one. Producers should offer different types of pictures, and there should be corresponding types of theaters in which to exhibit them” (­Patterson, 1920: 159, emphasis added). Patterson correctly identified the problem, but in proposing a consistent and stable “intellectual and social plane” for every movie theater, she was still imagining a habitual audience who always attends the same theater whatever is showing. This would soon come to fruition for art cinemas and highbrow audiences. In the meantime, for everyday moviegoing, the solution was the newspaper movie directory, which enabled moviegoers to find their own show (and implicitly their own class of audience). Early Buying Bulletins were an “amplification” of an earlier series, Shop First in The Plain Dealer, which was a campaign to turn “careless readers of advertising into considerate ones, converting casuals into regulars!” (EBB, 22 January 1922). Begun in July 1918 in the last months of the First World War, Shop First taught women readers on the home front to be more deliberate consumers – using the paper – as a wartime conservation measure with equal parts patriotic and personal benefits. The series continued long past the end of the war, transformed into an overt “Trade-Mark” for the paper’s “public service” as intermediary between its readers and its advertizers (SF, 6 January 1919). The Plain Dealer’s Shop First campaign was adapted across the country in diminished form, with Shop First in The Times-Dispatch (or Courier-Journal, or Tribune or Chronicle, etc.) standing briefly in 1919 as a type of national brand advertising for morning newspapers. Near the end of the numbered Shop First series, The Plain Dealer turned to the movies as part of the “home influence of the morning paper.” At least seven ads over the next two years proposed various ways to use the newspaper to make moviegoing more enjoyable and predictable (“Plain-Dealer Advertises to the Fans,” 1920). The film trade took notice and offered praise, in turn: “Good stuff for any newspaper. It’s circulation building, it encourages the exhibitor to more advertising because he is assured that the newspaper is thinking of him, and it’s real news to the subscriber” (“From 100% to Zero,” 1919). Subsequently, The Plain Dealer advertised directly to the moving picture trade (“Selling Pictures Every Day,” 1919). The Shop First logo and logic was used to advocate for a “unique co-operation for moving picture advertisers in Cleveland… Plain Dealer readers (are) a sold-in-advance audience… Shop First movie talks are only one angle of The Plain Dealer’s many-sided co-operation to moving picture advertisers” (“Unique Co-operation,” 1919, see Figure 29.2). 369

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Figure 29.2 Motion Picture News (30 August 1919, p. 1744)

Ensuring thrift and savings: “A dime works overtime in the movies” “‘Well—that was a poor show!’ says an irate father as he brings his brood home after a disappointing evening at the movies.” Thus began another Early Buying Bulletin on the topic of the movies, using the counterexample of time wasted to extoll the virtues of “The Planned Movie” (EBB, No. 46, 30 March 1922, see Figure 29.3). By mindlessly stopping at the first show nearest home, the ad explains, dad had just endured a repeat picture that he did not even like the first time. The ad chastises the careless patriarch, as if mimicking his own thoughts to himself: “Well, father, why did you see the same show twice?—Why did you 370

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Figure 29.3 Cleveland Plain Dealer (30 March 1922)

make such a poor movie ‘buy’?” The solution, shown in the accompanying illustration, is for father to consult the morning paper’s movie directory while the entire family has breakfast. To insure against time wasted at the movies and the letdown of a movie you do not want to see, the family needed to weigh each child’s favorite star and preferred type of show, consider mother’s concern for what was appropriate for the kids, “avoid the pictures you have seen, and finally the right movie is planned.” Insurance protected against losses, but it required a disciplined adherence to planning in advance and acting against happenstance. The movie directory provided a hedge against dissatisfaction by putting an end to haphazard circumstance in what you see. “The moral for father, mothers, boys and girls is to plan their movies from the authoritative ‘Movie Directory’ in The Plain Dealer.” Depicting the movie directory as a type of insurance policy to ensure amusement was actually more prevalent in the earlier Shop First series. In the first of its kind, the possibility of disappointment was resolved by the paper, “the only way to keep track of them—to know where the new and the old worth while ones are” (SF, 26 June 1919). The enemy was the element of happenstance that could lead to bad luck and a bad (or bored) time. Readers were admonished: “Don’t wander out haphazardly,” (SF, 16 July 1919), and “don’t take a chance” (SF, 14 June 1920), because “you didn’t have to risk being bored” (SF, 11 October 1921). One ad even made the bold claim that “there is only one safe way” to know when and where the movies were showing (SF, 23 July 1919). By and large, of course, the insurance of knowing ahead of time and planning in advance did not tap into anxieties or fears, but rather assured moviegoers that they were making smart, informed choices. The directory was routine given this actuarial capacity of prediction and planning for an evening’s fun and entertainment. “The time to begin to go to a movie is at the breakfast table!” began another of the five movie-themed Buying Bulletins. “It Pays to Plan ’em!… Such a procedure prevents disappointment, insures an evening’s pleasure for young and old, and the best movie-value for the price you want to pay” (EBB, No. 80, 13 June 1922, see Figure 29.4). The magic and wizardry of movies as a technological marvel was the subject of another Early Buying Bulletin, “The Witching Hour,” which juxtaposed the amazing depth and range of cinematic experience against its affordable cost. “The once or twice a week trip to the movies is the week’s ‘witching hour’ for most of us,” the ad explained as the pleasures of each type were extolled – comedy, melodrama, tragedy, travel pictures from across the world. The real lesson of this particular Bulletin, however, was the value of having this fun at such a 371

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Figure 29.4 Cleveland Plain Dealer (13 June 1922)

low cost. “For an extremely modest sum we may literally ‘drive dull care away,’… A dime works overtime in the movies—no doubt about it—and for twenty-five or fifty cents one can buy a genuine bargain in witching hours!” (EBB, No. 34, 9 March 1922). The assertion that the movies were affordable, especially in light of the value they provided, first appeared in one of the 1919 Shop First ads: “Laughing, learning, traveling, thrilling—all for a pittance. The movies are the least expensive habit of today” (SF, 23 July 1919). This phrase was actually borrowed for a nation-wide iteration of the Shop First ad campaign in August 1919 in 372

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The Atlanta Constitution, The San Francisco Chronicle, The Cincinnati Enquirer and many other papers across the United States. “What’s Good at the Movies?… The least expensive habit of today. Realize the millions of dollars poured into the fifth (largest) industry for your entertainment and enlightenment.” As the movie industry profited, so did the audience? The fantasy on screen, then, was somehow shared not just as a realized experience amongst the audience, but also as a realized investment with Hollywood itself. In sum, the value of going to the movies paid back so much in interesting things that it was better than a bargain – money spent at the movies was in effect a form of savings! As a series, Early Buying Bulletins continually reinforced to readers how thrift was a key skill in modern consumption. Some of the first Bulletins appearing in January 1922 encouraged and explained a contemporary banking tool called a “Thrift Club,” depositing a prescribed amount weekly for a year, paid out with interest in December just in time for Christmas shopping season. After memories of wartime austerity, saving for the national good retained the civic benefits, and the common interest in earning interest was a great sign of wealth and progress in a new period of growth and building: Thrift Clubs in our large cities are the most encouraging signs possible of the return of our national common sense, of our rapid forward march to permanent prosperity.… The greatest value of the Thrift Club is the drafting of millions of foolish, idle dollars into useful public service. (EBB, No. 4, 10 January 1922) If common good and personal gain could be conflated, so could saving and spending. The very first Buying Bulletin asserted how there are two good places to plant your money today—one is in a savings-bank and the other is in the surplus merchandise now being offered at the annual January sales. In either place your money is safe and working for you. (EBB, No. 1, 4 January 1922) Sales were equated with savings, so that “the safest place to begin buying your 1922 f­urniture is in the representative Furniture Sale advertisements in this newspaper” (EBB, No. 17, 5 February 1922). In the consumer ideology, a sale price meant saving, simply because it was cheaper than a more costly option. Following this logic of sale pricing, the novelty of self-service grocery shopping was “banking with a basket” simply because it saved the cost of home delivery (EBB, No. 12, 27 January 1922); and “a good cafeteria is a joy, a comfort, a money-saver and a very much worth-while convenience” simply because it was thrifty compared to eating at a restaurant (EBB, No. 18, 7 February 1922). The idea that the modest, regular cost of moviegoing was actually a form of savings derived from the depth and degree of enjoyment and wonder on screen, which made moviegoing worthwhile. The same logic appeared in Buying Bulletins for much more costly home phonographs and radio listening receivers. In those cases, the logic of weekly saving in a Thrift Club is replaced by the weekly installments of a major purchase bought on credit and paid back with interest. As with moviegoing, but on a larger scale, the value of amusement gained by a player-piano or a phonograph was more than worth the cost. “The music producing machine which we still call a ‘talking’ machine—which sings and plays and ‘dances’ as well as it talks. Turn on the tunes—that’s it!” (EBB, No. 40, 19 March 1922). Amusements could now be had at home through radio waves, too. The cost 373

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of wireless in the home was large enough to require savings or credit planned months in advance. And yet, readers were assured that “the expense of a modest and good-enough radio receiving equipment is almost negligible compared with the pleasure enjoyed” (EBB, No. 71, 24 May 1922). The language of fandom was applied also to modern jazz music, dancing and radio listening: Hearing’s believing as well as seeing, and it’s perfectly easy for you to be convinced, to hear for yourself the songs, music, and talk that’s prancing through the ether hereabouts. Buy a radiophone and listen in!… First thing you know, you’re a radio fan! (EBB, No. 68, 17 May 1922) While father’s taste in movies was presented as the mediator of the entire family’s fandom, the craze for popular music amongst the younger members of the family was unquenchable; only a phonograph as a “home magnet” would protect them: Youth must be served!—either at home or away from home—today’s youngsters are “crazy” over dancing—where? That’s up to you, dad, isn’t it?… Innocent fun and happiness are on tap in any home where a talking-machine and tripping-feet are in combination. (EBB, No. 32, 5 March 1922) Like this imperative to provide a safe home for jazz-age youth, the movie-themed Buying Bulletins consistently positioned the father as the authoritative consumer in the family. This differed markedly from most of the series – those concerning actually domestic affairs – ­that routinely make the mother and wife the authority who knows best. Early in the series, women readers were assured, “You’re an authority, Mrs. Better Half, on food, dress-goods, millinery and home-management…” (EBB, No. 3, 8 January 1922). Women’s domestic duties made them “the most capable Purchasing Agents now in business” (EBB, No. 12, 27 January 1922). Women were at the vanguard of new forms of consumption where men were hampered by their old-fashioned ways and freighted by their privileges. Nine women out of ten, especially business-women, get better food in a good cafeteria than they do at home and for less money… The gentleman is so accustomed to being “waited” upon, that he imagines that food-shopping will damage his dignity. (EBB, No. 18, 7 February 1922) Men also needed instruction from women on the value of being fashionable, because men in sales or service “make a better impression when they’re carefully, even modishly dressed” (EBB, No. 33, 7 March 1922). Women were even the subjects of Buying Bulletins about automobiles: “‘Step inside the car, Madam; you’re more than welcome!’” (EBB, No. 3, 8 January 1922). Why would the Bulletins make the movies paternalistic, unlike other forms of consumption that seem to portray a more progressive balance between women and men? Much silent-era movie marketing was targeted at young women, so why not target mothers? A possible answer lies in the fifth movie-themed Bulletin, which installs dad as the family movie censor.

Father knows best: “Kids are so sophisticated, so movie-‘wise’” “Children love to ‘play movie’,” noted a fifth movie-themed Early Buying Bulletin, underneath a depiction of three little kids doing exactly this: one dressed up as Bill Hart in cowboy 374

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outfit; a little girl as make-believe Mary Pickford; and the perpetual boy playing Charlie Chaplin, of course. Espousing the position of a charmed parent, the ad mused how it’s “wonderful to sit with or near a bunch of kids at the movies—they are so sophisticated, so movie-‘wise’,” while it then turned to the serious matter of the need for censorship. “There be high-brows who fear that the movies have a bad influence on the childish mind.” The possibility of harmful effects was acknowledged, although countered with the argument that good impressions last longer than bad ones. The conclusion domesticated the debate: “We may safely leave the choice of the child’s movie to the parent—it’s their responsibility.” Mother is noted to appreciate “all the help she can get in the entertainment line… for herself as well as the child,” just as father values “an inexpensive, fruitful hour for him and his best.” But, ultimately the title of the ad sides with the patriarch. It was father who makes the decision. It was dad who scans the movie directory in his morning newspaper. “Dad wants a good movie. Dad knows that—they’re all in The Plain Dealer.” Recall how it was father who opened other Bulletins by appreciating a good time at the movies, and by expressing disappointment with a poor movie “buy.” More than simply granting him the responsibility to choose the family’s movie, this Bulletin gave him full authority and power to act as “Dad— Movie Censor” (EBB, No. 19, 9 February 1922). Cleveland news readers would likely have known plenty about film censorship. One of the most prestigious and famous movies ever, D.W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation (1915), was banned by state censors in Ohio after its initial release, a ban that remained in place for decades (McEwan, 2008); censorship was still a raw and contentious topic in 1922. Ohio had been the first state to institute a censor board in 1913, and was the locus of a legal challenge over the constitutionality of film censorship that went all the way to the US Supreme Court in 1915 (Grieveson, 2004; Wittern-Keller, 2008). The court decreed moving pictures were “business, pure and simple” and not protected by First Amendment rights to freedom of speech and freedom of the press. States, like Ohio, were granted discretion to create censor boards – a situation that did not change until the 1950s and later. In this context, let me revisit the Early Buying Bulletins’ esteem for fathers as patrons of family moviegoing. While dad had authority and responsibility to choose, his impact was merely as the mediator of the conflicting interests within the family. The threat to father’s authority was not immoral influence on the kids, but rather the prospect of making an irrational or poor movie choice, of failing to navigate through the novelty of always new selections of movies, and failing to be wiser than his movie-wise kids. The movie directory allowed dad to successfully navigate the map of movie theaters across the city and tastefully select a good show from amongst the variety on offer. This vision of the “fourth estate” was a far cry from providing a forum for the democratic debate of truly impactful politics. The Bulletins upend journalism’s privileged place for newspapers in society as the public forum facilitating dispassionate and reasoned decisions as core acts of being an informed citizen (Hampton, 2010). Instead, with advertising as its central function, the newspaper facilitated wise and canny choices as core acts of being an informed consumer. In esteeming dad’s authority over the family as rooted in his choices as a consumer patriarch, this vision of the newspaper reserved political power for itself, with entertainment divorced from newsworthy topics as a matter of novelty and domestic harmony. In appointing dad as “movie censor,” but only within his own family’s private sphere, moviegoing was implicitly removed from the public sphere, leaving the newspaper itself intact as the authoritative free voice of reason in civic discourse. In the Early Buying Bulletins, “The Planned Movie,” with “Dad—Movie Censor” accompanied the cornerstones of modern consumption – automobiles, electric appliances, home 375

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furnishings and fashions, and home entertainment, too. Planned consumption relied upon the predictable periodical rhythm of the newspaper to chart a pleasurable course through the day, week, and season as a series of consumer choices. The movie directory, to be clear, was merely an informative timetable and chart of what was playing where. It was the conduit for the final decision of what to see and was reliant upon existing fandom of stars and styles and movie genres. As the movies became mainstream, newspapers guided the way, presenting a common banner for the many ways of going to the show. “The Movies” had many genres, styles, and durations; some were brand-new first-run features, others long-aged second-rate failures, each seen by audiences of different classes, ages, sexes, racial, and ethnic identities, seeing movies at different times and places, in different ways and at different prices. Only in the newspaper directory were these differences collapsed into a mass practice for a mass public. But the directory only worked if moviegoing was habitual and institutionalized, learned from months and years of repeated attendance complemented by periodical reading of movie magazines and gossip columns, collecting pictures of stars in scrapbooks, and advance publicity from the larger, illustrated display ads for first-run features at downtown movie palaces. The directory domesticated moviegoing, bringing it closer to home by promoting the facts – just the facts – of what was playing at neighborhood theaters. The newspaper’s directory of show times, mapping movies and stars onto the city’s screens, assured an entertainment that could not be found at home.

References Abel, R. (2015) Menus for Movieland: Newspapers and the Emergence of American Film Culture, 1913–1916. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. “Artcraft Starts Campaign.” (1916) Motography 28 October, p. 982. Barth, G. (1980) City People: The Rise of Modern City Culture in Nineteenth-Century America. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Chandler, Jr., A. (1977) The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Cohen, L. (2008) Making a New Deal: Industrial Workers in Chicago, 1919–1939. 2nd Edition, New York, NY: Cambridge University Press. “Columbia Instructor Adds Good Work on Photoplays.” (1920) Moving Picture World 20 November, p. 369. Dannenberg, J. (ed.) (1926) Film Year Book. New York, NY: Film Daily. Early Buying Bulletins. (1922) Cleveland Plain Dealer, No. 1, 4 January, to No. 95 8 August. “From 100% to Zero.” (1919) Motion Picture News 12 July, p. 505. Fuller-Seeley, K. (2012) “Storefront Theater Advertising and the Evolution of the American Film Poster.” In A. Gaudreault, N. Dulac, and S. Hidalgo (eds.) Companion to Early Cinema. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell (pp. 398–419). Gaines, J. (1990) “From Elephants to Lux Soap: The Programming and ‘Flow’ of Early Motion Picture Exploitation.” Velvet Light Trap 25: 29–43. Gomery, D. (1992). Shared Pleasures: A History of Movie Presentation in the United States. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press. Grieveson, L. (2004) Policing Cinema: Movies and Censorship in Early-Twentieth-Century America. ­Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Grusin, R. (2004) “Premediation.” Criticism 46(1): 17–39. Hampton, M. (2010) “The Fourth Estate Ideal in Journalism History.” In S. Allan (ed.) Companion to News and Journalism. New York, NY: Routledge (pp. 3–12). “High Class Motion Picture Theaters.” (1915) Chicago Tribune 24 April, p. 9. “Hollywood Hokum.” (1921) Motion Picture News 6 January, p. 570. Landro, V. (2002) “Faking It: The Press Agent and Celebrity Illusion in Early Twentieth Century American Theatre.” Theatre History Studies 22: 95–113.

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It Pays to Plan ’em! Leach, W. (1993) Land of Desire: Merchants, Money and the Rise of a New American Culture. New York, NY: Vintage. Lears, J. (1995) Fables of Abundance: A Cultural History of Advertising in America. New York, NY: Basic Books. Marchand, R. (1985) Advertising the American Dream: Making Way for Modernity, 1920–1940. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. May, L. (1987) “Making the American Way: Modern Theatres, Audiences and the Film Industry, 1929–1945.” Prospects 12: 89–124. McEwan, P. (2008) “Lawyers, Bibliographies, and the Klan: Griffith’s Resources in the Censorship Battle over the Birth of a Nation in Ohio.” Film History 20(3): 357–366. Miller, M. S. (1994) “Helping Exhibitors: Press Books at Warner Bros. in the Late 1930s.” Film History 6(2): 188–196. Moore, P. S. (2008) Now Playing: Early Moviegoing and the Regulation of Fun. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Moore, P. S. (2011) “The Social Biograph: Newspapers as Archives of the Regional Mass Market for Movies.” In R. Maltby, D. Biltereyst, and Ph. Meers (eds.) Explorations in New Cinema History. ­M alden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell (pp. 269–279). Moore, P. S. (2012) “Advance Newspaper Publicity for the Vitascope and the Mass Address of ­Cinema’s Reading Public.” In A. Gaudreault, N. Dulac, and S. Hidalgo (eds.) Companion to Early Cinema. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell (pp. 381–397). Moore, P. S. (2014) “Subscribing to Publicity: Syndicated Newspaper Features for Moviegoing in North America, 1911–1915.” Early Popular Visual Culture 12(2): 260–273. “Moving Picture Theaters.” (1915) Chicago Daily News 16 October, p. 3. Patterson, F. T. (1920) Cinema Craftsmanship: A Book for Photoplaywrights. New York, NY: Harcourt-Brace. “Plain-Dealer Advertises to the Fans.” (1920) Moving Picture World 11 December, p. 738. Sargent, E. W. (1915) Picture Theatre Advertising. New York, NY: Moving Picture World-Chalmers Publishing. Schudson, M. (1984) Advertising, The Uneasy Persuasion: Its Dubious Impact on American Society. New York, NY: Basic Books. “Selling Pictures Every Day: The Plain Dealer.” (1919) Motion Picture News 6 September, p. 1928. Shop First in The Plain Dealer (1918–1921) Cleveland Plain Dealer, Numbered Series No. 1 28 July 1918 to No. 121 17 September 1919, and continuing unnumbered to 28 October 1921. Staiger, J. (1990) “Announcing Wares, Winning Patrons, Voicing Ideals: Thinking about the History and Theory of Film Advertising.” Cinema Journal 29(3): 3–31. Strasser, S. (1989) Satisfaction Guaranteed: The Making of the American Mass Market. New York, NY: Pantheon. “Unique Co-operation: The Plain Dealer.” (1919) Motion Picture News 30 August, p. 1744. Warner, M. (2002) Publics and Counter Publics. New York, NY: Zone Books. Wittern-Keller, L. (2008) Freedom of the Screen: Challenges to State Film Censorship, 1915–1981. ­Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky. Zunz, O. (1992) Making American Corporate, 1870–1920. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

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30 WHY YOUNG PEOPLE STILL GO TO THE MOVIES Historical and contemporary cinemagoing audiences in Belgium Lies Van de Vijver One of the recurrent arguments within new cinema history is that cinemagoing was more than consuming or making sense of movies; it was a social event as well, and the sociality of the cinema was a key motivational factor for historical audiences. Researching contemporary cinema audiences raises a question about whether cinema remains a social event, and if so, what is the nature of its sociality in the digital era of a hypermediated society? The goal of this chapter is to examine the motivations for cinemagoing today and to establish the role of sociality for contemporary cinemagoers. After examining the literature on historical cinema audiences and their social motivations for cinemagoing, I will use a mixed-method approach in order to understand shifting cinemagoing motivations, both in the past and the present, highlighting the persistently social nature of cinemagoing. The chapter will use the results of a large-scale survey of contemporary youth audiences in Belgium, as well as an oral history study on historical cinema audiences.

The social motivation of cinema audiences Film scholars have demonstrated that cinemagoing is shaped not only by screen content but even more by the variety of times and places in which screenings occur, highlighting the social factor of cinemagoing. Ever since the arrival of the VCR in the 1980s, and even more in the contemporary age of digital cinema, theaters have, however, no longer been the sole point of access to filmed entertainment. Proclamations of cinema’s death are usually justified by pointing to its outdated distribution model and the fact that theatrical release is now seen as the tail wagging the marketing dog for subsequent and more profitable sales (Allen, 2011). Audiences, it is argued, are no longer obliged to watch a film on first release on the big screen; this is now just one consumer choice among many. Advocates of convergence culture pay attention to new media forms and to consumers who experience film as multi-platformed, brand-extended, and participatory ( Jenkins, 2006; Jenkins and Carpentier, 2013). As viewing becomes more mobile, with expanded access to media content on an increasing number of screens and hence less dependent on programming by venues, they argue that media consumption becomes more individual (Tryon, 2013) and presumably less social. The tendency in this line of argument toward technological 378

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determinism can lead commentators to ignore the extent to which cinemagoing is foremost a social activity. Historically, film was not universally distributed, nor was it exhibited in a uniform way, and it was certainly not viewed nor experienced in identical circumstances. Patterns of cinemagoing simply vary historically. Empirical research using socioeconomic, ethnographic, and other methods has underlined the heterogeneity of film audiences and emphasized the importance of social, cultural, and historical conditions to their varied experiences (Kuhn, 2002; Sedgwick, 2000). In order to engage with the lived experiences of actual audiences in the context of their everyday lives, scholars have abandoned broad generalizations and large-scale quantitative research designs to focus on close, detailed studies of specific places, people, and chronologies. Research on the sociality of cinemagoing practices engages us with cultural geography’s distinctions between place and space (Massey, 2005): where place locates a site of cinema, space identifies a constructed social site of cinemagoing (Allen, 2006). Historically, there has been much research into the place, architecture, infrastructure, and technology of film screenings, but traditional film studies have largely disregarded the spatiality of the film experience. Social conditions and cultural spatialized practices are, however, vital to the experience of cinema and are thus theoretically and historiographically inseparable from it. In calling for a “re-spatialised notion of film and film history,” Robert C. Allen (2006: 247) has argued that “meanings and pleasures cannot be read off the text in isolation but are rather deeply embedded in the social contexts of its viewing.” The space of cinema cannot, in consequence, be reduced to the places of filmic exhibition, because space, as Doreen Massey (2005: 26–28) argues, is not static or neutral but relational and always in process, a “simultaneity of stories-so-far.” This notion of the importance of the socially constructed space for the film experience has brought to the forefront of audience research the way that films are experienced in particular places at specific times. The cinema place is the most concrete element that the loose social actors who constitute an audience have in common; it gathers them up to watch a film. The experience of cinema does not exist outside the experience of space; it is a product of historically specific spatial practices of located social interaction. Much of the historical audience research concerning the sociality of cinemagoing is based on oral history, and research on memories of moviegoing has contributed ­significantly to defining the spatial and social conditions of the cinematic experience (Kuhn, 2002; ­Stacey, 1994). This illuminating bottom-up approach of lived cinema cultures has, at first, been limited to the Anglo-Saxon experience of American films in English-spoken film ­m arkets, but the field is growing rapidly, emphasizing the importance of oral histories for the ­understanding of the social experience of cinemagoing in different European countries (e.g. Paz, 2003; Treveri Gennari and Dibeltulo, 2017) and elsewhere (Dass, 2015). Together with new cinema historians’ interest in more recent cinema history, research on media industries and political economy have directed attention to the growth and development of the multiplex cinema and its audiences since its introduction in the 1980s. There are industrial analyses of the rise of multiplex cinemas in the United States and Great Britain and the decline of traditional single-screen theaters (Acland, 2003; Fuller-Seeley 2008; Gomery, 1992; Hanson, 2013; Klinger, 2006; Smith, 2005). Other studies have looked at their effect on programming diversity (Barker, 2013) and the digital turn with its concomitant impact upon distribution (Hanson, 2007a). Contemporary empirical audience research within film studies is quite varied in its attention not only to the contemporary commercial cinema ­audience (­Atkinson, 2014; Corbett, 2001; Docherty, Morrison, and Tracey, 1986; Hanich, 2017) but also festival or art house audiences (Ateşman, 2015; Dickson, 2015; Evans, 2011; Hollinshead, 2011; 379

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Martinez et al., 2015), genre and national cinema preferences (Meers, 2003), and the gendered experience of specific films (Bradby, 2013). Surveys on contemporary a­ udiences in Belgium, for instance, are often related to or focused on the profound entwinement of cinema and digital culture, especially within convergence culture research (­Veenstra, 2017). As such, film consumption is examined within a broadened multi-­platformed ­media environment, entangling the cultural practice of cinemagoing within a multimedia use. The “surviving” practice of going to the cinema today is, however, less researched (Van de Vijver, 2017). The commercial multiplex cinema provides a site through which to explore the evolution of film e­ xperiences since the fundamental changes of the 1980s in production (blockbusters), ­d istribution (­saturation release), and exhibition (purpose-built multiscreen theaters; Hanson, 2007b). At the beginning of the 1980s, the social construction of moviegoing changed radically, with the spread of multiplex venues, which Phil Hubbard (2003) has described as providing audiences with a service hatch rather than a social site, since these venues were architecturally designed to individualize the cinema experience for media consumers. Now that ancillary markets have a higher economic importance than the theatrical premiere, the industry no longer depends primarily on the social habit of going to the movies (Klinger, 2006; Allen 2011). Contemporary cinema audiences predominantly consist of a generation who have had their most common experiences of movies in nontheatrical exhibition sites: the domestic spaces of bedrooms, living rooms, and kitchens. Allen (2011: 44) has argued that these viewers experience cinema as a textually disintegrated phenomenon through multiple and unpredictably proliferating sites and modalities. The sociality historically ascribed to cinemagoing is, for this generation, no longer an intrinsic characteristic of film viewing. In today’s personalized media landscape, in which film is accessible on any screen at any time, the social has itself become an option for seeing a film. Yet neither the architecture of the multiplex nor the individualized film watching platforms exclude the social. Janna Jones (2011) argues that “while contemporary cinema-­going practices are far less public than they once were, many of the fundamental elements of cinema’s sociality in cinema’s classic era persist into the present.” She fortifies her argument by examining the ritualized familial event called movie night, the fundamental elements of which are the organization of leisure time and connectedness to other people. Because her research is focused on young people’s relationship to family, Jones (2011, 2013) considers film consumption as an element in a life course but still insists on the social aspect of film consumption. Kevin Corbett (1998) reached a similar conclusion when looking at the act of cinemagoing as symbolically important to the forming, maintaining, and transforming of interpersonal relationships. He argues that industrial imperatives as well as cultural forces are likely to preserve the cinema place, because the multiplex can offer the simultaneous promise of a primarily social event in which one can also experience highly individualized escapism (Corbett, 2001).

1950s and millennial audiences in Belgium go to the movies Besides arguing that cinemagoing had less to do with the movie than with the act of going to the movies, Richard Maltby has described the challenges of new cinema history’s quest for audiences as “pursuing the heterogeneous purposes of the unidentified participants in a myriad of undocumented events” (Maltby, Biltereyst, and Meers, 2011: 33). Questions about who actually saw films, when and how they were experienced, make up a large part of the debate concerning cinema audiences. The individual ordinariness of everyday life is unique 380

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to everyone, but it is also shared through routinized behavior (Inglis, 2005). To consider cinemagoing motivations in everyday life involves analyzing the accessibility and availability of movies on a daily basis and assessing their creation of meaning within other leisure-time activities. The analysis that follows is based on two research methods – oral histories and surveys – which are both part of larger research projects on the historical and contemporary experience of cinema culture in Ghent.1 The oral histories aimed to analyze the importance of cinemagoing in a local community defined by class, language, and a pillarized society (in which everyday life was compartmentalized within socialist, Catholic, Flemish nationalist, or other frameworks, creating a pattern of ideological and religious segregation which overlapped with social class conflicts). Respondents were found through an advertisement in the local newspapers. In total, 62 participants were selected and interviewed about their cinemagoing habits from the 1930s onward. ­Respondents were selected by age (born between 1915 and 1950) and interviewed in their home environments about habitual cinemagoing experiences when they were young people. Discussion of cinemagoing experiences was preceded by questions of a sociodemographic nature and issues about behavior patterns in the periods under consideration. The interviews were structured around three themes: the context of moviegoing, the pillarized film exhibition scene, and personal memories of moviegoing experiences. All interviews were fully transcribed and analyzed according to a coded tree structure, and in this chapter, my focus is on respondents’ motivations for cinemagoing and the social aspects of the cinemagoing experience. The survey on contemporary cinema experiences was part of a larger research project on film culture in Ghent since the introduction of the multiplex in the city in 1981. It covered a convenience sample of 472 cinemagoers born between 1975 and 19952, and focused on contemporary and remembered multiplex cinema experiences. In order to contextualize participants’ cinemagoing, the survey included questions regarding contemporary media use, leisure activities, and diversified digital visual consumption. The closed-ended questions in the survey were analyzed using SPSS software to provide statistical information on the respondents’ media use. The qualitative analysis focused on a close reading of the answers to the open-ended questions. Cinemagoing has long been embedded in the ordinary activities of everyday life. According to older cinemagoers, their main recurring reasons for choosing cinema as a form of leisure in the past were its inexpensive status, its provision of social entertainment, and its often being the only available form of leisure, all of which preceded any consideration of the movies that audiences actually saw. But the everydayness of cinemagoing was conditioned by having the necessary financial resources (Van de Vijver and Biltereyst, 2013): for some, cinemagoing was only possible by using discount cards for certain cinemas during the week or else by finding or being given small change. Weekly attendance, or what can be called habitual cinemagoing, might have been the case before the Second World War, when movie programs changed every week and social routines included visits to district or neighborhood cinemas, but even then, oral histories consistently indicate the importance of tickets being discounted or paid for by friends or parents and attendance this frequent was never the case for cinemagoers who had to pay full price. Interviewees also reported making an assessment of the ratio between price and quality: if cinemagoing meant paying for the tickets, then the evening needed to have a full program of movie entertainment, including newsreels and cartoons as well as the feature, which would if possible be spectacular. Male cinemagoers also talked about their clear understanding of the price differentiation mechanisms in city center cinemas, some of which had special entrances to avoid class mixing. Female respondents discussing attendance in the 1930s and 1940s often 381

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cited financial reasons when talking about the advantages of working in the cinema with free admission to other cinemas or the paying companionship while courting. These recollections raise questions about the claimed inexpensive nature of cinemagoing as an explanatory factor in its popularity. Cinema attendance rates rose after the 1930s, but in the late 1950s, with the introduction of television and the vast diversification and growing accessibility of leisure possibilities (Van de Vijver and Biltereyst, 2013), attendance fell. In addition to its relative affordability, cinema was regarded as a socially sanctioned form of leisure spending. Interviewees reported that one of the most common reasons for visiting a cinema was to be with one’s friends or a date in a safe and socially acceptable environment but out of sight of prying parental eyes. The idea of communal cinemagoing is also ever present in the oral history testimonies. The need to escape, mentally as well as physically, was understandably more frequently mentioned in memories of the war years of the 1940s, but some families also spent entire Sundays at the movies because of the heating. From the 1950s to 1970s, the everyday nature of cinemagoing in an environment with few alternatives gave way to one in which it became one possible choice among a number of increasingly varied and accessible forms of leisure, including theater, dancing, sport, and tourism. As cinemagoing became less habitual, the cost of going to the movies became less imprinted in these respondents’ memories, and their attendance was often combined with other activities like dancing or visiting a bar. Recalling the late 1960s and 1970s, respondents mentioned restaurant visits more frequently, implying a greater capacity for discretionary spending and an expansion of the social aspect of cinemagoing beyond the event of the screening itself. Cinema managers shifted their programming profiles to diversify their audiences, catering to the declining number of habitual cinemagoers during the week but showing an increasing number of movies at the weekend that were suitable for adults only. This strategy, however, made cinema a more questionable form of social leisure spending for young people, and in all the oral history accounts, the last days of going to the movies are recorded as being drained of nostalgia and filled with spite toward the deteriorating condition of the city center cinemas, their services, and their movies. Confronted with the new way of organizing cinema audiences in the multiplex, older cinemagoers describe the experience of these venues as being devalued by the lack of social elements and the absence of cinema staff catering to their needs. Combined with the “loud noises and fast images,” the lack of social decorousness, familiar atmosphere, and good-mannered contact between the audience and staff members kept elderly cinemagoers from visiting the multiplex cinema. For the digital generation who did not grow up with the city center cinema palaces that existed before the 1990s, nostalgia cannot overshadow the “shoebox theatre,” as the multiplex is derogatively nicknamed by elderly respondents in the oral history research. One cannot question contemporary cinema audiences without being aware of the prolific presence of movie-watching platforms available to them. Yet their motivations for watching a movie on the big screen are strongly reminiscent of those of earlier audiences for whom cinemagoing was an everyday pastime. Although these young people have a wide range of opportunities to watch films, they retain an overt fondness for cinemagoing. In their discourses, watching films on small screens – whether on television, iPad, or computer – was mentioned frequently but not valued or preferred over cinemagoing. For them, the foremost characteristic of watching a movie on a small screen is that it needs to be free of charge. ­Financial constraints are still important for young people; it is the main reason for not going to the multiplex cinema more often. Time, effort, and transportation are not, however, issues. Their cinemagoing is motivated by their desire for the best aesthetic experience and by the need to escape, often simply from boredom. 382

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The reasons that young viewers give for watching film in a nontheatrical environment have to do with personal comfort, the range of film choice, spontaneity, convenience, and control. They appreciate the cinematic experience for the possibility it presents of being engulfed or immersed but criticize it because it cannot be controlled by pausing at one’s convenience. Personal comfort and control over the filmic experience keep young people in front of smaller screens, while going to the movies is an event, a cultural practice defined through an aesthetic choice of films deemed to be worth the financial input. Today, film watching is mundane or ordinary, while cinemagoing is extraordinary. This becomes evident in the young people’s mentioning of image quality and the aesthetics of digital surround sound, reminiscent of older viewers’ remembered demand for spectacular film in the 1950s. Contemporary viewers’ descriptions of television trailers triggering their anticipation for a movie, and of the hustle and bustle of the audience or the smell of popcorn, can be compared to older respondents’ descriptions of the majestic calicots (painted billboards), endless queues, and snacks offered by cinema personnel. Although the idea of being led through concession stands by the architecture of the multiplex is not appreciated at all, the atmosphere is still described as relaxing as well as exciting. Even the in-house unwritten rules of socially accepted behavior are not that different: from having previously been guided to your seats by ushers to the silencing of smart phones and hushing of talkative audiences today. The social factors of multiplex audience behavior and the remembered social factors of the historical audiences constitute similar communities of social actors who share a common set of cultural references. In parallel descriptions of cinema’s immersiveness, both sets of respondents describe the atmosphere inside and outside the venue as being comfortable and relaxing, but at the same time anticipatory, concentrated, and excitingly tense. Although contemporary young people may pursue the best possible screening quality with which to consume spectacle, their treasured memories of multiplex visits continue to emphasize the sociality of the event, and their memories and retold experiences testify more to a remembered space that is emotionally charged rather than recalled for its technical or aesthetic ­v irtues. These are recollections of nights out with friends, of smuggling food into the cinema, of date nights and “end of an era Harry Potter” nights. They might acknowledge the service hatch, as they testify of the guided audience movements, but they hardly feel trapped in hyper individualistic “space bubbles” (Hubbard, 2003). Their treasured memories affirm more a certain type of socialized experience (Morley, 1992) than their present-day arguments would suggest and identify the importance of life stages for cinemagoing. Just as the elderly respondents were, contemporary audiences are in a stage of their life in which cinemagoing is a prominent social cultural practice. They express their requirements for excellent cinematic experience linked to film aesthetics, followed by a need to simply spend leisure time in good company. These interviewees are filmic flâneurs, who find pleasure in wandering through cinematic and other media landscapes, alone and with others. Like their predecessors, they are limited by the financial constraints. Given the opportunity, however, they prefer the cinematic experience because of their appreciation of film aesthetics and remembrance of its social aspect.

Conclusion When looking at cinemagoing motivations today, the literature often tends to emphasize changes in the market and the economically questionable prioritizing of theatrical ­release. An understanding of how audiences create social meaning in cinemagoing, and what  forces  drive  social and aesthetically motivated movie-watching, can add to such 383

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an account. Going to the movies was and remains a social activity, not substitutable by individual consumer opportunities, in much the same way as the introduction of individual music listening does not substitute for concert attendance. Cinemagoing is remembered both by contemporary and historical young audiences because of treasured company or the imagined community submerged in the eventfulness of blockbuster or spectacle experiences. The memories of sociality and the present dynamics of cinematic experience suggest that the substitution debate around modes of viewing cannot be considered in technological terms alone and that the cinematic experience is nowhere near its demise. Starting from a bottom-­ ­up approach, these accounts balance the sometimes binary discussions in the literature on the technologically deterministic agency of hypothetical audiences and the Bourdieuian emphasis on the structuring practices of media producers (Van de Vijver, 2017). The audiences in both research projects are not hypothetical constructions; the projects’ methodologies ensured that they defined their own practices and routines. These specific practices by these specific audiences, framed by a specific cinematic architecture, can result in certain detectable scripts or rules of engagement. Space is revealed to be a key factor of the cinematic experience when these audiences themselves articulate their experiences in spatial terms. There is a methodological argument here to be made for the use of oral histories, surveys, and the importance of combining quantitative with qualitative analysis, or close readings, of discourses on social and cultural practices. I would, furthermore, argue that the sociality of cinemagoing constitutes an understanding of cinema as a set of practices rather than a normative or foundational mode of the experience of specific places. This chapter’s bottom-up approach to young peoples’ historical and contemporary experience of cinema has indicated that the supposed decline of the cinema cannot be reduced to technological explanations, as it is still best understood as selling a habit, a certain type of socialized experience.

Notes 1 The oral histories were part of the larger research project “Gent Kinemastad” (funded by the Special Research Fund-Ghent University (BOF), 2009–2011, supervisor D. Biltereyst) on the history of the film exhibition, programming, and experience in Ghent (1896–2010). The survey was part of the research project “Cinema Located” (funded by the Special Research Fund-Ghent University (BOF) 2012–2013 and the Research Foundation – Flanders (FWO) 2013–2016), study on place, space, and social experience of cinema in Ghent (1982–2012). 2 For this research, I set up an online survey available to first bachelor students in a class on international communication, hence the age range of the respondents; it is, however, important that an average of 75 percent of the respondents were between nineteen and twenty-two years old. The survey made use of nonprobability sampling.

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Why young people still go to the movies Barker, M. (2013) Live to Your Local Cinema: The Remarkable Rise of Livecasting. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Bradby, B. (2013) “Our Affair with Mila Kunis: A Group Ethnography of Cinema-Going and the ‘Male Gaze.’” Participations 10(1): 3–35. Corbett, K. (1998) “Empty Seats: The Missing History of Movie-Watching.” Journal of Film and Video 50(4): 34–48. Corbett, K. (2001) “The Big Picture: Theatrical Cinema-going, Digital Television and Beyond the Substitution Effect.” Cinema Journal 40(2): 17–34. Dass, M, (2015) Outside the Lettered City. Cinema, Modernity, and the Public Sphere in Late Colonial India. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Dickson, L. (2015) “‘Ah! Other Bodies!’: Embodied Spaces, Pleasures and Practices at Glasgow Film Festival.” Participations 12(1): 703–724. Docherty, D., Morrison, D., and Tracey, M. (1986) “Who Goes to the Cinema?” Sight and Sound 55(2): 81–85. Evans, E. (2011) “Superman vs Shrödinger’s Cat: Taste, Etiquette and Independent Cinema Audiences as Indirect Communities.” Participations 8(2): 327–349. Fuller-Seeley, K. (ed.) (2008) Hollywood in the Neighborhood. Historical Case Studies of Local Moviegoing. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Gomery, D. (1992) Shared Pleasures: A History of Movie Presentation in the United States. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press. Hanich, J. (2017) The Audience Effect. On the Collective Cinema Experience. Edinburgh: Edinburgh ­University Press. Hanson, S. (2007a) “‘Celluloid or Silicon?’ Digital Exhibition and the Future of Specialised Film ­E xhibition.” Journal of British Cinema and Television 4(2): 370–383. Hanson, S. (2007b) From Silent Screen to Multi-Screen: A History of Cinema-Going in Britain since 1896. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Hanson, S. (2013) “A ‘Glittering Landmark for the 21st-Century Entertainment Centre’: The History of the Point Multiplex Cinema in Milton Keys.” Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television 33(2): 270–288. Hollinshead, A. (2011) “And I felt Quite Posh!” Arthouse Cinema and the Absent Audience – the Exclusions of Choice.” Participations 8(2): 392–415. Hubbard, P. (2003) “A Good Night Out? Multiplex Cinemas as Sites of Embodied Leisure.” Leisure Studies 22: 255–272. Inglis, D. (2005) Culture and Everyday Life. London: Routledge. Jenkins, H. (2006) Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. New York, NY: New York University Press. Jenkins, H. and Carpentier, N. (2013) “Theorizing Participatory Intensities: A Conversation about Participation and Politics.” Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies 19(3): 265–286. Jones, J. (2011) “‘When the Movie Started, We All Got Along’: Generation Y Remembers Movie Night.” Media International Australia 139: 96–102. Jones, J. (2013) “The VHS Generation and their Movie Experiences.” In K. Aveyard and A. Moran (eds.) Watching Films: New Perspectives on Movie-Going, Exhibition and Reception. Bristol: Intellect. Klinger, B. (2006) Beyond the Multiplex. Cinema, New Technologies, and the Home. Berkeley, CA: ­University of California Press. Kuhn, A. (2002) An Everyday Magic. Cinema and Cultural Memory. London: I.B. Tauris. Maltby, R., Biltereyst, D., and Meers, Ph. (eds.) (2011) Explorations in New Cinema History: Approaches and Case Studies. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell. Martinez, J., Frances, M., Agirre, K., and Manias-Muñoz, M. (2015) “Zinegin Basque Film Festival: A Non-Existent Audience Revealed.” Participations 12(1): 725–738. Massey, D. (2005) For Space. London: Sage. Meers, Ph. (2003) “It’s the Language of Film! Young Audiences on Hollywood and Europe.” In R. Maltby and M. Stokes (eds.), Hollywood Abroad: Audiences and Cultural Relations. London: British Film Institute (pp. 158–175). Morley, D. (1992) Television, Audiences and Cultural Studies. London: Routledge. Paz, M. (2003) “The Spanish Remember: Movie Attendance during the Franco Dictatorship, ­1943–1975.” Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television 23(4): 357–374.

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31 FOR MANY BUT NOT FOR ALL Italian film history and the circumstantial value of  audience studies Mariagrazia Fanchi

In Italy, the history of audiences has played a marginal role in film and media studies. At least until the second half of the 1990s, it received scant attention and was largely peripheral in academic debates, as film studies still revolved entirely around directors and movies. This chapter seeks primarily to demonstrate the heuristic value of audience research for the Italian history of cinema and for Italian history tout court. Indeed, an examination of the cinematic experience and its social, cultural, and political function through the lens of audiences reveals new elements that allow us to recount the past in a new and clearer way. This essay focuses on a key time in Italian cinema history: the 1950s. Cinema in Italy was thriving, with burgeoning film output, growing numbers of cinemas, and rising ticket sales. That evidence has long fueled a belief that moviegoing was a common experience in 1950s Italy, shared by everybody, regardless of who they were or where they lived. As I endeavor to show, this hasty historical conclusion ignores the profound social differences in Italy at the time and the resulting contrasting attitudes towards cinema itself. That incomplete analysis has encouraged an equally superficial and approximate reading of the reasons that saw cinema plunge into crisis, marginalized in terms of cultural consumption in the five short years from 1956 to 1960. By examining cinema audiences and analyzing the traces of their experiences left in market surveys, cinema industry statistics, the Catholic Church’s guidelines, and historical documents about the Italian people’s economic and social conditions, especially anthropological and ethnographical studies, this chapter will spotlight the fragmented and uneven spread of moviegoing in 1950s Italy, particularly in the south, as a clue to and explanation for the resilience of the local pre-modern social structures. The analysis has three stages: a description of the method, inspired by Carlo Ginzburg’s circumstantial model; a deconstruction of the thesis on the spread of cinemagoing, by studying audiences; and a case study of cinema’s failure in southern Italy.

Traces, clues and conjunctures: audience studies and the circumstantial model Cinema audience studies in Italy have developed relatively recently: with few exceptions (Brunetta, 1989; Spinazzola, 1985), research on cinema audiences began only in 387

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the second half of 1990s. The effects of the “historiographical turn,” the consolidation of a line of research in the cultural history of cinema and media, the opening up to Cultural Studies, and the (­b elated) arrival of television audience studies prompted an initial core of projects that sought to shed light on audiences as a neglected aspect of Italian cinema history. The historiographical model adopted by these studies can be traced back to Ginzburg’s circumstantial approach. Ginzburg devised the method in the 1960s and developed it through a series of studies on a wide range of subjects: sorceresses and heretics, works of art, texts and documents on classical culture, and contemporary Italian historical events. The approach looks beyond the confines of official history, using unconventional sources and focusing on apparently uninfluential matters. Through Ginzburg’s authority, cinema audience studies found a legitimation and an inspirational source in the circumstantial paradigm, which had become accepted practice in Italian historical studies. My analysis exploits three principles of Ginzburg’s method. First, data and materials largely neglected by traditional historiography receive specific emphasis. This is, perhaps, the defining trait of Ginzburg’s work. In his first studies, for instance, he worked on documents from the Inquisition Tribunal, considering them as anthropological reports (Ginzburg, 1986/1990) and focusing on cases regarded as minor and without historical significance (Ginzburg, 1966/1983, 1976/1980). Similarly, I examine evidence forgotten or overlooked by cinema history in Italy, such as regional statistics on cinema consumption, reports on moviegoing and cinema audiences commissioned by advertising agencies, and ethnographic accounts of living conditions in different areas of the country. These documents, seemingly inessential for the history of cinema, allow us to reformulate a view of cinema, and even society, in 1950s Italy. Second, in History, Rhetoric and Proof (1999), Ginzburg demonstrates that if all the individual clues are put together, they acquire evidential value and enable us to clarify facts and historical processes. Except for information on tickets sold and cinema statistics, audience history in Italy has no organized, validated data repositories to draw on; all we have are “clues.” These heterogeneous fragments of evidence say little, individually; they must be combined and compared if we are to “return to the global sense of reality” (Ginzburg, 2007: 42). By applying such an “investigative” approach, this chapter collects an array of materials and connects them in order to reconstruct a picture of cinema ­audiences in the 1950s. Finally, the audience’s as yet unrehabilitated position in film studies (Allen, 2006; ­Biltereyst, Maltby, and Meers, 2012; Maltby, Stokes and Allen, 2007) gives scholars an ­advantage: it offers the chance to look at phenomena from different perspectives, to handle new data and evidence, to propose alternative historical interpretations. Like the strange, exotic, eccentric characters inhabiting Ginzburg’s works, Italian audiences show us a different history of cinema, one populated neither by famous people nor by “winners,” the history not of the “majority” but of the “minority”: prosaic, contradictory and politically incorrect (Ginzburg, 1999). This chapter aims to “normalise” the audience anomaly and to recount a key period in Italian cinema history, including and taking into account those who were absent both from movie theaters and from history. Starting from the above premises, and in line with this tradition, the following analysis spotlights the relationship between audience experience, the fate of cinema in Italy and the crucial question, from a political, social and economic viewpoint, of the integration of the country’s southern regions. The aim is to reveal the circumstantial value of audience studies for cinema history and for the social and cultural history of the country. 388

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Post-war moviegoing and the cinema experience The history of cinema in Italy has long considered the years between the political stabilization of the country, after the 1948 elections, and the mid-1950s, as the zenith of cinema’s popularity. The cinema industry did indeed grow considerably in this period (Brunetta, 1993; Colombo, 1998; Forgacs and Gundle, 2007). From the end of the 1940s to mid-1950s, more than 4,000 cinemas opened, bringing the number of movie theaters in Italy to over 10,000 (Corsi, 2001; Quaglietti, 1980). Many – one in three at the end of the 1950s (Bizzarri and Solaroli, 1958; Quaglietti, 1980) – were parish cinemas. With their low prices, and together with small-gauge cinemas, they were one of the most important places for viewing films (Fanchi, 2014). By the mid-1950s, box-office receipts had swollen to more than 116 billion lira (about 1.5 billion euros in today’s currency). The most popular genres were melodramas and light romantic comedies (Baroni, 1995; Rondolino, 1977; Spinazzola, 1985; Villa, 2002). Spectators’ life histories reveal that cinema was a central component of the collective imagination: actors, films, plot, styles and fashions (from hairstyles to clothes and expressions) were systematically picked up and propagated by other media, becoming ­essential reference points, especially for young people (Fanchi, 2002; Treveri Gennari, O’Rawe, and Hipkins, 2011). There were several reasons for this success. At the end of the 1940s, Italy’s economy experienced a marked upturn. Thanks to the Marshall Plan, conditions in the country improved rapidly, as did consumers’ purchasing power (Crainz, 2003). The fastest-growing sector was the media and culture (Capuzzo, 2003; Colombo, 1998; Forgacs and Gundle, 2007). ­Cinema, in particular, became a crucial medium (Dagrada, 2016; Gremigni, 2009), ­ atholic ­considered a ­f undamental tool of political propaganda (Bernardi, 2004) and the C evangelization of the people (idem, Della Maggiore and Subini, 2018). A new ­d riving force in the country’s economic and social growth emerged: the young, who soon became the target audience most courted by the radio, cinema, and record industries (­Colombo and Eugeni, 2015). Based on this data, traditional historical research concluded that in the 1950s, cinema was an experience shared by all Italians. This false assumption fueled a series of errors and contradictions: the idea that cinema could perform its modernizing role throughout the country; that cinemagoing contributed to the mass emancipation of women; or that the cinema crisis that began in 1956 was due only to the spread of television – ignoring the fact that cinema consumption decreased from the middle of the decade in regions where television hadn’t even arrived – and not to cinema’s partial and superficial penetration. The prevalent historiographical approach, centered on the text and its authors and interpolated with the dominant aesthetic and philological tradition in Italian film studies, struggles to grasp the complexity and the differences in the experiences of cinema audiences in Italy in the period in question. Even though cinema was an extremely popular pastime in 1950s Italy, spectators’ experiences were uneven. The geographical distribution of cinema consumption was clearly not uniform across the country, with moviegoing concentrated in northern Italy. Cinema and media consumption grew throughout Italy, but after the Second World War, most movie theaters were in the north: in 1955, when moviegoing was at an all-time high, there was on average one cinema for every 3,335 inhabitants in northern Italy, but only one for every 7,300 in the south (SIAE, 1956). Furthermore, cinema was an urban experience, typical of a few larger cities. In the same year also, Italian city-dwellers went to the cinema thirty times a year on average, compared to eleven times for those living outside the city (SIAE, 1956). Data and 389

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sociological research from the time both show that even in Lombardy, the region around Milan, one of Italy’s wealthiest areas with the highest concentration of movie theaters, there was a striking imbalance between the level of cultural consumption in urban centers and that in rural and alpine areas. Large swathes of the region had hardly any cultural activities, including cinema (Secchi, 1958). The unevenness of cinema attendance becomes even more apparent if we examine sources such as market research and spectators’ recollections (Casetti and Fanchi, 2002; ­Fanchi, 2002). These all reveal that cinemas were mainly frequented by men and young people living in northern cities (Fanchi, 2010). The most striking difference was between the genders. Even though the most successful genres in the 1950s were comedy and drama, of eminent female appeal, market research commissioned by advertising agencies reported a consistent prevalence of male spectators in cinemas. The masculinization of cinema audiences was spurred by both the Catholic Church and left-wing political groups, which joined forces to keep women inside their domestic walls, insisting that their primary role was as wives and mothers (Fanchi, 2010). A second disparity, between the generations, became fully apparent by the late 1950s. Spectators’ memories and market research shed light on this aspect, too. For younger audiences, the cinema experience was key to their identity (Treveri Gennari and Dibeltulo, 2017), first as a socializing experience, especially in local and parish cinemas, and later to distance themselves from the older generations, when the latter stopped going to the cinema. Much of the market research of the time reveals the emergence of a youth culture in which cinema had a primary role (Colombo and Eugeni, 2015). Finally, from the second half of the 1950s, cinema evidently became a class-based experience, one that was increasingly unable to engage the middle classes, by then Italy’s largest social class, and was clearly divided between niche productions for highbrow audiences and more popular productions (Corsi, 2001). The cinema magazines (especially Borsa Film, Cinema Nuovo and Rivista del Cinematografo) show as much, identifying the progressive disappearance of “average” audiences from cinemas from the late 1950s on, driven towards other forms of entertainment considered more commendable, chiefly television (Garofalo and Roghi, 2015). A key driver in this process was undoubtedly the Catholic censorship, enforced by the Centro Cattolico Cinematografico (Catholic Cinema Center), which began to take a harder line from the mid-1950s, slashing the number of films deemed morally suitable for Catholics to view (Mosconi, 2018). Analyzed from the audiences’ perspective, new aspects of the history of cinema in 1950s Italy emerge, laying the foundations for a clearer, more robust interpretation of this period. The circumstantial value of audience becomes even more evident in the light of developments in those years in southern Italy, as the connection between the cinema crisis and its social and cultural context touched on one of the most historically important issues in the history of united Italy, the Questione Meridionale (Southern Question) (Banfield, 1958; ­Gramsci, 1926/2000; Lutz, 1962; Rossi Doria, 1975; Saraceno, 1974).

Moviegoing and the southern question The Questione Meridionale is a complex and much debated topic in Italy. It concerns the differences that divide the south of the country from the central and northern parts, impeding the fostering of a national identity throughout the twentieth century (Ferrarotti, 1997; Galli della Loggia, 2010; Graziano, 2007). The years in question featured an extensive program of support for the south (Cassa del Mezzogiorno) aimed at overcoming the cultural and economic gap between the “two 390

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Italies” (Cafiero, 1996; De Rosa, 2004). Cinema had a key role. From 1950 to 1959, dozens of new cinemas opened in southern regions: in Sicily and Sardinia, for instance, the number of movie theaters rose 157 percent on average year on year, especially in the largest urban centers, and at decade’s end there were almost 1,000 (Quaglietti, 1980). Although the ­cinema network in the south was not as extensive as in the north, it created the conditions for ­moviegoing to take root. When the cinema crisis worsened, however, at the end of the decade, the first cinemas to close were in the south, where cinema had just emerged and had still an aura of novelty. Audience experience is again crucial to understand these events. Following a circumstantial approach, I search for “clues” of cinema’s weakness and the reasons for its extremely fast trajectory in the “Mezzogiorno d’Italia” during the 1950s, by looking beyond the usual confines of film studies and tapping into the wider body of ethnographic and anthropological research conducted at the time into southern people’s living conditions. Despite state investment in infrastructure development, as late as 1970 the Social Investments Study Centre (CENSIS, 1970: 314) reported that most of southern Italy still “does not share in the benefits of urban development”: the few urban centers had underdeveloped roads, the electricity grid and telephone network were inadequate, the economy was predominantly agricultural, and family income was the lowest in Italy. Moviegoing in the 1950s was therefore a privilege for an urban minority, as Luca Pinna, Malcolm S. MacLean Jr., and Margherita Guidacci’s study on Thiesi, a town in Sardinia, showed (Pinna, MacLean, and Guidacci, 1958). The lack of roads and transport prevented rural dwellers (i.e. most of the population) from reaching movie theaters. Even the mobile cinema had limited circulation here (Missero, 2015; Toschi, 2006), being a regular presence only on the plains, which, except for Sicily and Puglia, represent only 20 percent of the territory. Even for residents of the south’s few urban centers, cinema was a rare experience: ticket prices were a stretch for many families (parish and after-work cinemas, which were cheaper, were few and far between in the south), and the vast majority of people lacked the time for entertainment (Anfossi, Talamo, and Indovina, 1959). Furthermore, cinemagoing flouted the social norms which required that people of different classes or social groups be kept firmly apart. An anthropologist of the time wrote that “the main characteristic of Sicily and the rest of the south is conservatism, which has produced paralysis and formalism” (Aglianò, 1950 quoted by Tentori, 1966: 22). Relations between people of different classes, sexes, social roles, and generations followed strict, rigidly controlled models that remained the same over time (Cancian, 1961); different social groups were kept apart. Sharing the cinema space was seen as likely to lead to excesses, moral and otherwise. Women in particular were warned against the moral dangers of the cinema. In the 1950s, southern society had a rigid patriarchal structure: as Tullio Tentori (1960: 14–15) described it, “the role of a woman is, from a natural point of view, that of wife and mother, and she must focus her life exclusively on this task.” The horizon open to women was essentially domestic; access to the public sphere was limited. This situation was, however, typical not only of southern women or rural areas. As Pier Paolo Pasolini (1961: xviii–xix) wrote in the introduction to Gabriella Parca’s investigative book Le italiane si confessano (Italian Women Confess), “In Italy there is still a type of female alienation that does not belong in the modern industrial phenomenology but is essentially archaic, preceding what for civilized nations has become the emancipation of women.” For an unaccompanied adult woman, going to the cinema was therefore considered socially deplorable behavior to be discouraged and punished (Fanchi, 2010). 391

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The home and family were the hub of social life, “the primary group” and “the primary ‘organ’” of the southern social system (Anfossi, Talamo, and Indovina, 1959: 12). This centrality, which Edward Banfield (1958) called “familism” – a particular characteristic of southern Italy, with ruinous consequences – helps to explain an otherwise inexplicable fact. As noted above, despite the economic investment, cinema was unable to consolidate its presence in the south in those years, whereas television spread rapidly (Gismondi, 1963; RAI, 1958; Rea, 1959) becoming the most coveted durable good, often bought in instalments, even before essential household appliances such as fridges and washing machines (Rea, 1959). Francesco Alberoni (1967), perhaps Italy’s most famous sociologist at this time, explained this anomaly as an attempt to close the gap with the north, at least symbolically: purchasing a television sublimated the desire for emancipation from poverty and backwardness, incorporating a symbol of modernity within a pre-modern social and economic system. Television undoubtedly had a key role in national unification through, for example, spreading the Italian language and cutting through the babel of local dialects (De Mauro, 1963). But it was unable to bring together the “two Italies”: familism, immobilism, and conservatism continued to stymie development in the south and delay its arrival in the modern age. Cinema consumption’s failure to grow in the south was therefore both a symptom of a specific social condition, the consequence of an inhospitable environment for the cinema experience, and a factor that reinforced this situation and maintained it unchanged for at least another decade. It betrayed and revealed the clear limits of public interventions in those years, which failed to grasp the specific aspects of the southern world, reducing it to an exotic stereotype (Forgacs, 2014). In a misguided attempt to apply instruments and policies (including cinema) typical of other areas of the country, the interventions were fatally ineffective.

Conclusion In describing the circumstantial method, Ginzburg (1986/1990) mentions a short story by Conan Doyle: The Adventure of the Cardboard Box (1892). In it, Holmes resolves the mystery of a macabre gift (a pair of severed ears) sent to a young woman by observing the shape of the lobes. Like the earlobes for Holmes/Ginzburg, moviegoing in the 1950s offers us a significant clue that can shed light not only on the social and cultural meaning of cinema in Italy but also on Italy’s broader social, economic, and even political history. By studying the audience, I have been able to reconsider the truism of cinema’s popularity in Italy and to better understand the reasons for its crisis at the end of the decade. Indeed, the collapse of cinema consumption after television appeared can be interpreted as a consequence of an uneven distribution of moviegoing and of cinema’s failure to engage several social groups. Therefore, audiences and moviegoing offer additional elements for evaluating the relationship between cinema and wider historical processes. The analysis of moviegoing in southern Italy, for instance, highlights the chain of errors and the ideological pall that conditioned and jeopardized efforts to develop this area: cinema and its incomplete circulation became emblematic of a myopic, ineffective political approach. Audience analysis also reveals how the cinema experience was alien to the aspirations and life models of the people who lived there. By contrast, television was able to tap into those models and aspirations, fueling a broader movement of privatization and individual closure that was a determining factor in eroding civic pride and the pride in the state in later decades. As one of those key fields that, according to Ginzburg, should be our starting point on our journey to decipher history, audience studies broaden our knowledge. If audience studies 392

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still appear peripheral to film studies, it is this very aspect that endows them with extraordinary heuristic value. They allow us to examine questions differently, reveal neglected aspects, permit us to formulate new hypotheses, and encourage that sort of lowly inference typical of working with raw, lost, ill-organized empirical data that demand flexibility and rigor fitting for an historical reconstruction. Even more importantly, they allow us to understand the present, and the value and relevance that the cinematic experience still has today.

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Mariagrazia Fanchi Forgacs, D. and Gundle, S. (eds.) (2007) Mass Culture and Italian Society from Fascism to the Cold War. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Galli della Loggia, E. (2010) L’identità italiana. Bologna: Il Mulino. Garofalo, D. and Roghi, S. (eds.) (2015) Televisione. Storia, immaginario, memoria. Catanzaro: Rubbettino. Ginzburg, C. (1966/1983) The Night Battles: Witchcraft and Agrarian Cults in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries. John and Anne Tedeschi (translators). Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins Press. Ginzburg C. (1976/1980) The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller. ­Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins Press. Ginzburg, C. (1986/1990) Myths, Emblems, Clues. London: Hutchinson Radius. Ginzburg, C. (1999) History, Rhetoric and Proof. The Menahem Stern Jerusalem Lectures. Hanover, NH: University Press of New England. Ginzburg, C. (2007) “Réflexions sur une hypothèse vingt-cinque ans après.” In D. Thouard (ed.) L’Interprétation des indices. Enquête sur le paradigme indiciaire avec Carlo Ginzburg. Villeneuve d’Ascq: Septentrion Presses Universitaires (pp. 37–47). Gismondi, A. (1963) “Popolarità dello Spettacolo Televisivo.” In ART, Rai come servizio pubblico. Rome: Biblioteca dello Spettacolo (pp. 63–75). Gramsci, A. (1926/2000). “Some Aspects of the Southern Question.” In D. Forgacs (ed.) The Gramsci Reader. Selected Writings 1916–1935. New York, NY: New York University Press (pp. 171–185). Graziano, M. (2007) Italia senza nazionale? Rome: Donzelli. Gremigni, E. (2009) Pubblico e popolarità. Il ruolo del cinema nella società italiana. 1956–1967. Florence: Le Lettere. Lutz, V. (1962) Italy. A Study in Economic Development. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Maltby, R., Stokes, M., and Allen, R.C. (eds.) (2007) Going to the Movies. Hollywood and the Social ­Experience of Cinema. Exeter: University of Exeter Press. Missero, D. (2015) “Proiezioni di pubblico. Il cinema itinerante ENAL (1962–1963) nelle aree rurali fra propaganda e rifiuto.” Immagine. Note di storia del cinema 11: 175–190. Mosconi, E. (ed.) (2018) I cattolici fra cinema e media, cultura e società (1940–1979), Schermi. Storie e culture del cinema e dei media in Italia, 3. Pasolini, P.P. (1961) “Prefazione alla III edizione.” In G. Parca (ed.) Le italiane si confessano. Florence: Parenti (pp. ix–xiv). Pinna, L., MacLean, M., and Guidacci, M. (1958) Due anni col pubblico cinematografico. Ricerche ed ­e sperienze. Rome: Bianco e Nero Edizioni. Quaglietti, L. (1980) Storia economico-politica del cinema italiano. 1945–1980. Rome: Editori Riuniti. RAI (1958) Quaderno dei Servizi Opinioni 3: Il pubblico della televisione nelle varie regioni d’Italia con particolare riguardo al Sud. Torino: Edizione Radio Italiana. Rea, D. (1959) “Il sogno televisivo.” Prospettive Meridionali 11: 25–27. Rondolino, G. (1977) Catalogo Bolaffi del cinema italiano. 1945–1965. Turin: Bolaffi. Rossi Doria, M. (1975) Scritti sul Mezzogiorno. Turin: Einaudi. Saraceno, P. (1974) Il meridionalismo dopo la ricostruzione. Rome: Giuffrè. Secchi, C.C. (1958) “L’interdipendenza fra città e campagna sotto l’aspetto culturale.” In AISS, ­L’integrazione delle Scienze Sociali. Città e campagna. Bologna: Il Mulino (pp. 617–624). SIAE (1956) Lo spettacolo in Italia. Rome: Pubblicazioni Siae. Spinazzola, V. (1985) Cinema e pubblico. Lo Spettacolo filmico in Italia. 1945–1965. Rome: Bulzoni. Tentori, T. (1960) Donna, famiglia, lavoro. Rome: Ufficio Stampa Presidenza Centrale CIF. Tentori, T. (1966) Ricerche sociali in Italia. 1945–1965. Rome: Amministrazione per le Attività ­A ssistenziali Italiane e Internazionali. Toschi, D. (2006) “I cineambulanti dell’opera nazionale combattenti.” In F. Casetti and E. Mosconi (eds.) Spettatori italiani. Rome: Carocci (pp. 109–112). Treveri Gennari, D. (2014) “Moralizing Cinema While Attracting Audiences: Catholic Film ­E xhibition in Post-War Rome.” In D. Biltereyst and D. Treveri Gennari (eds.) Moralizing Cinema. Film, Catholicism and Power. London: Routledge (pp. 272–285). ­ emories Treveri Gennari, D. and Dibeltulo, S. (2017) “‘It Existed Indeed … It Was All over the Papers’: M of Film Censorship in 1950s Italy.” Participations: Journal of Audience and Reception Studies 14(1): 235–248. Treveri Gennari, D., O’Rawe, C., and Hipkins, D. (2011) “In Search of Italian Cinema Audiences in the 1940s and 1950s: Gender, Genre and National Identity.” Participations: Journal of Audience and Reception Studies 8(2): 539–553. Villa, F. (2002) “Consumo cinematografico e identità italiana.” In M. Fanchi and E. Mosconi (eds.) Spettatori. Forme di consumo e pubblici del cinema in Italia. 1930–1960. Venice: Marsilio Editore (pp. 189–203).

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1000 and One: The Blue Book for Non-Theatrical Films 61 Abdullah, Taufik 232 Abel, Richard 8, 16, 17, 65, 68–82, 119, 138, 144, 202, 203, 322, 323, 367, 368 Acland, Charles 56, 84, 205, 226, 305, 307, 379 Adelaide, South Australia 42, 200, 217–227, 229, 230 admission prices see exhibition adult audiences 299 adult education 31 Adventure of the Cardboard Box, The (1892) 392 advertisements 70, 73, 74, 81, 90, 118, 138–146, 169, 323, 365, 381 in newspapers 18, 78, 365–377 nickelodeon 16, 42 studio press books 367 A-features 164 Africa 8, 43, 108, 139, 236 African Americans 19, 23, 69, 75, 194, 203, 263 age distribution of films 270, 329, 330, 334, 335, 339 Agis (Associazione Generale Italiana Spettacolo) 344 Agrasánchez, Rogelio 257, 259, 263 agriculture 130 Alberoni, Francesco 392 Allen, Robert C. 2–5, 9, 13–15, 16–27, 31, 42, 44, 47, 59, 60, 79, 96, 105, 106, 116, 124, 163, 214, 254, 281, 320, 356, 378–380, 383, 388 Altenloh, Emilie 5, 10 Althusser, Louis 39 Altman, Rick 296, 297, 300–302 amateur cinema 307, 314 Americanization 68, 70, 78, 79

Amsterdam 109, 150, 152, 157, 181, 232, 233, 331, 332, 334, 338 amusement parks 118, 125, 132 amusement taxes. See entertainment taxes Ancestry.com 20 Anderson, Gilbert M. 68, 139 Anderson, Mark 203, 205, 212, 213 animation 226 Annales school 6, 7, 40 antitrust 148, 162, 165 Antwerp 21, 66, 96, 100, 104–109 Arclight 10, 26, 65, 83–91, 94; see also Project Arclight Ardan, S. M. 232 Argus Film Company 75 Armbrust, Walter 357 Arzner, Dorothy 30 Asia, Southeast 200, 234, 235, 242 Associated Press 70 Athique, Adrian 163 Atlantis (1913) 270, 324, 325, 327 attendance see audiences audiences 1, 2, 4, 7, 8, 13, 14, 16, 17, 19, 23, 25, 26, 29, 31, 32, 39, 42–44, 47, 52, 59, 62, 69, 72, 74, 96, 117, 119, 121, 124, 132, 136, 137, 139, 140, 147, 161–165, 167, 169, 170, 173, 178, 184, 187, 188, 194, 202, 207, 218, 221, 222, 226–230, 246–250, 258, 259, 270–272, 278, 281, 292–294, 297–302, 309, 319, 321, 322, 324–326, 331, 333, 342–344, 346–348, 355–361, 362, 366, 367, 369, 373, 379, 382, 383, 387–390, 392. See also children, cinemagoing, cinematic experience, consumption, fans, reception, spectators, spectatorship, viewers adult audiences 299

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Index attendance, 6, 7, 100, 102, 103, 121, 136, 140, 155, 163, 169, 176, 180, 200, 234, 249, 272, 330, 343, 344, 376, 381, 382, 384, 390 audience composition 249 audience demographics 246 audience research 32, 347, 379, 387 audience statistics 6, 8, 13, 59, 98, 102–105, 194, 246, 249, 274, 282, 343, 387–388 audience surveys 7, 10, 31, 43, 136, 167, 169, 200, 217, 226–230, 232, 244, 246, 342, 352, 378, 380–381, 384, 387 audience taste 59, 137, 270 audiences as consumers 50, 174, 218, 271, 300, 365, 369, 380, 389 child audiences 47, 61, 249, 299, 309, 313, 375 family audiences 118, 166, 228, 300, 302, 365–367, 374–375 female audiences 29, 202, 212, 312 Indian audiences 357–362 local audiences 14, 42–43, 117, 202, 220, 234, 255, 288 middle-class audiences 144, 163 Muslim audiences 249 nickelodeon audiences 16, 42 noisy 52, 362 passive 40, 53, 357, 361, 363 rural audiences 115, 126, 130, 132 schools as exhibition sites 307, 315 sophisticated audiences 6, 33, 66, 101, 122, 144, 265, 322, 374, 375 teenage audiences 300 urban audiences 344 working-class audiences 167, 259, 263 youth audiences 298, 299, 301–302, 342, 378 aurality 347 AusCinemas database 217 Australian cinema 144 authorship 40, 42, 67, 125, 127, 255, 360 Autorenfilm 324 avant-garde 313 Azteca Films 260, 262 B pictures 166 Balaban & Katz 164, 165, 170, 175 balanced program see exhibition balconies see motion picture theaters Balio, Tino 40, 41, 287, 297, 298, 300–302, 307 Banfield, Edward 390, 392 Bara, Theda 72 Barbary Coast (1935) 293, 294 Barden, Rebecca 42 Barefoot, Guy 296, 298, 299 Barker, Martin 323, 346, 353 Barthes, Roland 358, 360, 363 Bassermann, Albert 139 Batavia see Jakarta

Batman 299 Beach, Edward R. 119, 164, 165 Beerbohm Tree, Herbert 139 Belgium 43, 96, 99, 100–104, 109, 255, 331, 342, 378, 380 Bengal Brigade (1954) 223 Ben-Hur (1925) 329, 333 Benitez, Miguel 257 Benjamin, Walter 40, 52, 90 Bernhardt, Sarah 139, 141, 144, 270, 325, 326 Betty Boop 301 Big Broadcast of 1938 (1938) 301 big data see data biker movies 298, 300, 302 bilingual films 102, 201, 254, 263 Biltereyst, Daniel 1–12, 14, 28–38, 42, 44, 56, 57, 66, 96–111, 112, 124, 125, 245, 246, 255, 309, 320, 380–382, 384, 388 Bioscope, The 47, 51, 53, 236, 240, 241 Biran, Misbach Yusa 232 Birth of a Nation, The (1915) 14, 23, 41, 42, 375 Black, Alfred S. 203, 205, 208–212 blind bidding see distribution Bloch, Marc 98, 109 block booking see distribution Blom, August 270, 324 Blom, Ivo 102, 204, 270, 334, 335 Blonde Venus (1932) 320 Body Heat (1981) 350 Bogart, Humphrey 348 Bohemian Girl, The (1936) 335 Bo’ness 48–50 Bo’ness Journal 50 books 8, 14, 41, 42, 61, 83, 86, 142, 209, 246 Bordwell, David 30, 229, 264, 281, 320 Borsa Film 390 Boum sur Paris (1953) 129–132 Bowles, Kate 56–57, 214 box office see exhibition boycotts 136, 147, 149, 151–157 Brando, Marlon 348 Brandt, Harry 89, 181 Brandum, Dean 136, 187–197 Braudel, Fernand 7 Brewster, Ben 30 Brinton Entertainment Company 112–122 Brinton, Indiana 114, 116–120 Brinton, W. Frank 112–122 Britain 5, 14, 28–31, 33, 37, 42, 43, 100, 101, 140, 143, 149, 155, 156, 203, 299, 335, 356, 379 British films 136, 153, 187, 191, 193–196 Broadway theaters 90, 91, 174, 177 Brown, Noel 300 Bulldog Breed, The (1960) 223 Burke, Peter 6, 7 Business Week 170

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Index businesswomen 202, 203, 208 Butt, Arthur 18, 22, 24 Butt, John 24 café tabac 129 Cagney, James 293, 294 Campbeltown 48–50 Campbeltown Courier 52 Canjels, Rudmer 296, 299 Cannibal Isles of the South Pacific (1918) 333 capitalism 126, 310 Card, James 326 Carou, Alain 327 Carpetbaggers, The (1964) 221 Carr, E.H. 46, 48, 53 cartels 148–152, 155, 156 Catholic Church 159, 387, 390 Caughie, John 14, 15, 46–54 censorship 30, 31, 101, 139, 152, 306, 308–399, 312–313, 321, 331, 332, 335, 374, 375, 390 in Ohio 375 central business district (CBD) 219, 222, 223, 225, 227 Centro Cattolico Cinematografico (Catholic Cinema Center, Italy) 390 Česálková, Lucie 14, 270, 305–318 Chalfen, Richard 36 Chaplin, Charles 145, 368, 375 Chautauqua meetings 119 Chennai 342, 357 Chicago 6, 20, 56, 61, 68, 72, 75, 79, 81, 88, 91, 136, 164–170, 175, 181, 187–189, 191–196, 257, 265, 368 Loop District 187, 191, 192, 194 Near North Side 187, 191, 192 Chicago American, Hearst’s 368 Chicago Record-Herald 368 Chicago Tribune 68, 72, 79, 81, 368 children 28, 33–35, 47, 61, 233, 249, 299, 309, 313, 329, 349, 365, 371, 375 Chisholm, Darlene 190 Cine Pallas 250, 251 cinema: cinema advertisements 138–146 cinema programming see exhibition cinema memory 29, 36, 108, 344 early cinema 13, 14, 17–19, 46–50, 52, 53, 124, 200, 214, 241, 245–247, 249, 251, 253, 319, 326 nontheatrical cinema 14, 55–62, 305, 307–309, 313–315 Cinema Audiences in Australia Research Project (CAARP) 217, 230 Cinema Context 4, 9, 100, 331, 332 Cinema Craftsmanship (1920) 369 “Cinema Dictionary, A,” 72, 80 n.26 cinema halls see motion picture theaters

cinema history 2–5, 7, 9, 13, 14, 16–18, 20–22, 24–26, 32, 33, 43, 44, 47, 51–53, 55, 56, 65, 66, 69, 72, 78, 79, 96, 101, 108, 123, 124, 126, 132, 140, 161, 199, 200, 203, 213, 214, 245, 270, 271, 288, 303, 305, 315, 319–22, 324, 325, 327, 341, 352, 356, 379, 388. See also film history, new cinema history Cinema Nuovo 390 cinema of attractions 47, 121, 255, 322 cinema owners. See also exhibitors 138, 143, 144, 152, 312 cinemagoing 2–4, 6, 9, 13, 14, 19, 22, 28, 29, 33–37, 43, 44, 52, 56, 57, 59–60, 66, 97, 98, 100, 101, 108, 123, 126, 141, 200, 201, 218, 222, 227, 245, 246, 249, 251, 255, 264, 298, 299, 300, 303, 320, 341–347, 350, 351, 352, 355, 358, 378–384, 387, 389, 391. See also moviegoing, experiences of cinema rural cinemagoing 48, 66, 92, 113, 129, 239, 272 cinemas see motion picture theaters CinemaScope 2 cinematic apparatus 170 cinephilia 29, 126 circulation of cinema see distribution circus 124, 234, 241, 255 Cirque Féerique Anderson 323 CLASA-Mohme 260, 262 class 6, 20, 41, 69, 70, 92, 99, 100, 105, 113, 119, 120, 125, 139, 141, 163, 168, 196, 202, 233, 259, 263, 292–294, 309, 342, 344, 357, 360–362, 366, 368, 369, 381, 390 See also middle class class distinction 196 Classical Hollywood 161, 229, 281 classification (film) 200, 242, 312 clearance see distribution clearance windows 58, 183, 218, 220, 221, 223 Cleopatra (1963) 73, 74 Cleveland 69–74, 76, 78–81, 164, 365–369, 371, 372, 375 Cleveland Leader 70, 79 n.15 Cleveland Plain Dealer 69–72, 75–77, 79–81, 365–377 Club Apollon 247 Coate, Bronwyn 136, 187–197 Cohen, Matthew I. 234, 241 Cohen, Sydney S. 85, 89, 91, 97, 208–213 College Swing (1938) 301 Collins, Diane 223 colonialism 200, 233 Columbia Pictures 150, 152, 154, 157, 178, 187, 188, 196, 218, 221, 222, 259, 278, 289, 292, 299, 300, 369 Colvin, J. Brandon 56

397

Index comedy 50, 120, 129, 130, 220, 221, 248, 289, 292, 293, 302, 371, 390 Commonwealth Fund conferences 26, 41 comparative research 4, 9, 10 n.5, 19–21, 59, 66, 96–109, 125, 203, 229, 245, 323–324, 326, 342 Constantinople 247 consumer goods 129, 131 consumer society 366 consumption see moviegoing continuous performance see exhibition contracts 30, 142, 240, 257, 260, 273, 281, 293, 294, 369 convergence culture 378, 380 Cook and Harris Company 116–119 Cook, Bert and Fannie 113, 118, 119 Cooper, Gary 130, 203 Corbett, Kevin 379, 380 Courriou, Morgan 9 Crashing Through to Berlin (1918) 74 Crawford, Robert 48, 212 Cressey, Paul G. 6, 8, 9 crowdsourcing 3 cultural exchange 4, 123, 213 cultural memory 14, 29, 31, 33–35, 37, 345 Cultural Memory and British Cinema-going of the 1960s (AHRC research project, UK) 43 cultural policy 315 cultural studies 4, 31, 98 cultural values 315, 324 cycles see film cycles Dancing Co-Ed (1939) 300, 302 data 3, 4, 6–9, 14, 20–25, 33, 46, 47, 53, 61, 65–67, 69, 83, 84, 86–89, 98, 99, 100–106, 108, 109, 112, 114, 121, 122, 124, 128, 137, 138, 140, 152, 153, 155–157, 188–190, 200, 213, 226, 230, 235, 255, 265, 273, 277, 278, 282, 288, 293, 320, 323, 325–327, 330, 332, 333, 339, 344, 346, 353, 388, 389 big data 4, 65, 66, 83, 84, 87, 125 databases 4, 55, 57, 62, 138–146 Daughter of Macgregor, A (1916) 53 Daw, Marjorie 72 Day, Dorothy 72 De Vany, Arthur 190 Dean, Daisy 69, 79 n.2 Dean, James 347–348 Dear Ruth (1947) 220–221 Deleuze, Gilles 5, 17, 18 Democratic Party (U.S.) 70 demographics see audiences Desmet, Jean 9, 141, 334, 335 Detroit 69–82, 87, 165 Detroit Free Press 69, 70–71, 72, 75–76 Devine, Tom 48 Dibbets, Karel 4, 5, 98, 100, 126, 149, 270, 281, 329–340

Dibeltulo, Silvia 341, 344–354, 379, 390 Dick, Howard W. 235, 238, 239 Diederichs, Helmut H. 324, 325 difference from weekly average (DWA) 137, 188–196 digital humanities 3, 13, 16, 53, 65, 66, 83–85, 352 distribution 2, 3, 13, 23, 55, 56, 60–62, 69, 75, 91, 121, 136, 138–140, 142–145, 149–152, 154, 156, 161–163, 165, 166, 170, 173–180, 182– 184, 188, 194, 199, 204, 205, 207, 214, 221, 234, 254, 255, 257, 264, 265, 270, 272–274, 281, 287, 288, 290, 292, 297–300, 305–307, 313–315, 319–326, 330–332, 334–337, 344, 368, 378–380, 389, 392 advance booking 118, 141 blind bidding 175, 176 block booking 162, 175, 176, 261, 287, 292, 293 circuits 24, 103, 116, 162, 164, 170, 173–180, 201, 212, 218–222, 226, 234, 256–258, 260, 261, 263–266 clearance 136, 162, 164, 173–179, 181–184, 200, 218, 223, 225, 229, 273, 274, 367 clearance windows 58, 183, 218, 220, 221, 223 film circulation 2–4, 8, 13, 22, 23, 56, 61, 62, 66, 69, 70, 72, 75, 78, 79, 84, 88, 123, 141, 143, 154, 155, 162, 165, 166, 173, 174, 177, 180, 184, 211, 270–274, 277, 281, 282, 285, 296, 299, 302, 305, 330, 334–336, 339, 369, 391, 392 film supply 157, 334, 335, 337 first run 173, 174, 177–182, 184, 218, 222, 223, 226, 273, 275, 277–279, 281, 290, 291 global 138–146 marketing 8, 105, 139, 140, 142, 177, 300, 314, 321, 322, 331, 339, 374, 378 release patterns 179, 217 rental of motion pictures 60, 71, 78, 79, 114, 117, 143, 150, 157, 162, 181, 335, 339 run-zone-clearance system 136, 173–179, 182–184, 225 runs 17, 32, 56, 57, 60, 73, 105, 108, 113, 136, 144, 150, 162, 164, 165, 169, 170, 173–184, 187, 189–191, 194, 196, 199, 200, 205, 206, 208, 211–213, 217–219, 221–223, 225, 226, 229, 235, 236, 238, 239, 260, 261, 263, 272–275, 277–282, 285, 288–293, 298, 300–302, 327, 330, 331, 333, 336, 339, 368, 376 showcase 108, 136, 151, 173, 174, 177–184 saturation release 174, 183, 380 zones 105, 136, 173–179, 182–184, 200, 218, 223, 225, 229 distributors 141, 143, 144, 152, 176, 177, 180, 182, 188, 226, 273, 281, 282, 292, 331, 333–335 divorcement 174 Dodge Brothers Motor Company 70, 210 Dollman, Melissa 25

398

Index Domino, Violet 47 Domitor 124 double bills see exhibition Doyle, Conan 392 drive-ins see exhibition Drouzy, Maurice 324 Duckett, Victoria 325, 326 Dullin, Charles 72, 80 Durkheim, Emile 97 DWA see difference from weekly average Early Buying Bulletins, in Cleveland Plain Dealer 365–377 early cinema see cinema Early Cinema in Scotland (AHRC research project, UK) 43, 46–54 East of Eden (1955) 347–348 economics 97, 271 Eddy, Nelson 43 Edgerton, David 241, 242 Edison film company 40, 143, 236, 247, 323 Edison, Thomas A. 40 Educational Association (Svaz Osvětový) 306, 308, 311 educational films 42, 55, 61, 75, 120, 264, 305–316 Elberse, Anita 187 electric lighting 234, 240 electricity 67, 128, 199, 200, 232, 233, 239, 240, 241, 391 Eliashberg, Jehoshua 187 Enfants du Capitaine Grant, Les (1914) 333, 335 entertainment 2, 18, 22, 24, 53, 61, 87, 112, 113, 115, 117, 120, 121, 123, 124, 126, 132, 136, 139, 141, 144, 164, 166–168, 191, 200, 205, 211, 212, 218, 219, 225, 232, 233, 238, 242, 256, 258, 259, 270, 282, 288, 292, 300, 305, 307, 310, 313, 315, 320, 326, 341, 342, 365, 366, 368, 371, 375, 376, 381, 390, 391 entertainment taxes 101, 310, 313. See also amusement taxes entrepreneurs 141, 236, 310 Epic of Everest, The (1924) 333 Epstein, Edward Jay 226 Epstein, William 257–258 erotic films 307 Esoofally, Abdulally 240 ethnicity 8, 56, 72, 78, 200, 233, 246, 249, 250, 260, 263–265, 376 ethnography 8, 14, 28–29, 31–32, 359 Europe 18, 21, 48, 97, 102, 108, 126, 139, 144, 147, 149, 232, 234, 235, 239, 245, 248, 251, 254, 298, 299, 327, 333 European Network for Cinema and Media Studies (NECS) 16, 26, 43, 109 evergreen films 61, 270, 281, 329–339

everyday life 2, 7, 17, 55, 61, 67, 99, 126, 128, 230, 233, 342, 344, 380, 381. See also moviegoing exhibition 2–5, 9, 10, 13–15, 21, 44, 46, 47, 50, 52, 55–62, 66, 81, 87, 91, 96–98, 100, 105, 106, 108, 109, 112–122, 124, 126, 129, 132, 136, 138–140, 142–144, 147, 149, 150, 152, 156, 159, 161–163, 165, 173, 174, 176, 177, 180–184, 187, 189, 194, 196, 199–205, 211–214, 217, 219–225, 227, 229–232, 241, 245–247, 250, 251, 254, 255, 257, 263–265, 270, 273, 274, 277, 278, 287–289, 291, 293–295, 297–303, 305–315, 319, 320, 322–324, 329–332, 334–339, 342, 355–357, 363, 379–381, 384 admission prices 164, 174, 178, 180–182, 189, 255, 273, 274, 282, 289, 292, 293, 391 balanced program 136 box office 13, 56, 60, 92, 98, 113, 114, 116–119, 136, 137, 161, 164, 165, 167, 169, 170, 175, 181, 187–192, 194, 196, 200, 217, 226, 229, 271–275, 277–279, 281, 285, 287–290, 292, 302, 330, 332, 344, 389 children’s matinees 329, 333, 338 churches as exhibition sites 56–61, 307 continuous performance 136, 159, 161, 170 double bills 136, 159, 161–171, 174, 222, 223, 261 drive-ins 177, 178, 200, 217, 222–226, 229, 261, 298 exclusive 139–140, 307 film bookings 49, 116, 142, 178, 179, 181, 183, 203, 287, 290, 331 film promotion 72, 73, 77, 90, 117, 132, 138, 139, 141, 143, 144, 298, 301, 367, 368 hold overs 191, 292, 294 itinerant exhibition 18, 24, 25, 66, 112–122, 200, 234, 235, 241, 242, 247, 263, 367 libraries as exhibition sites 307 local 42, 139–140, 144, 138, 140, 141, 162, 212, 217 matinees 329 mixed bills 299, 302 museums as exhibition sites 307 nontheatrical exhibition 56, 59, 60, 307–309, 314, 315, 380 performances 117–121, 131, 140, 141, 144, 218, 248, 251, 360–362 picture grosses 137, 179, 181, 187–196 programming 2–5, 9, 10, 55, 57, 61, 78, 98, 99, 108, 109, 136, 152, 155, 156, 162, 164, 168, 170, 189, 190, 191, 196, 201, 221–223, 228, 229, 254, 255, 264, 265, 270–273, 277, 282, 301, 311, 313, 326, 344, 353, 379, 382, 384 revivals 298 roadshows 177, 179

399

Index screenings 5, 44, 47, 55–61, 99, 103, 129, 136, 144, 155, 167, 178, 190, 194, 218, 221–224, 233, 247, 249, 258–261, 263, 273, 274, 277, 289, 291, 313, 315, 330, 332, 333, 335, 336, 342, 359, 360, 382, 383 small town exhibition 17, 23, 48–51, 92, 93, 113, 115, 119, 128, 144, 199, 211, 212, 254, 265, 305, 349 Sunday screenings 58–60, 248, 313 ticket sales 104, 117, 168, 387 exhibitor trade associations 203–208, 213 exhibitors 18, 19, 21, 66, 87–92, 94, 112, 118, 130, 136, 143, 152, 162–165, 173, 180, 187–191, 196, 200, 203, 208, 210–214, 226, 229, 236, 241, 242, 272, 273, 278, 294, 322. See also cinema owners independent exhibitors 88, 94, 163, 176, 180, 203, 205, 287 showmen 18, 21, 22, 94, 236, 368 suburban exhibitors 217 women exhibitors 202–214 Exhibitor’s Herald 88 Exhibitors Trade Review 88, 89 experiences of cinema 3–9, 13–15, 22, 28, 29, 33–36, 42, 47–49, 51, 59, 60, 109, 161, 163, 170, 234, 299, 329, 342, 344–346, 356, 360, 371, 379–381, 383, 384, 387, 389, 392, 393. See also cinemagoing, moviegoing exports. See also foreign market 140, 150 Eye Film Museum 335 fads 297 Fairbanks, Douglas 72–74, 292 Fall of the Roman Empire, The (1964) 221 families 228, 300, 302 as moviegoers 61, 128, 161, 194, 233, 365–367, 370–375, 382, 391, 392 family films 300 Famous Players-Lasky 74, 203, 205, 210–212 fan magazines 28, 65, 68, 72, 86, 138, 287 Fanchi, Mariagrazia 343, 387–394 fans 7, 8, 28, 29, 65, 68, 72, 86, 138, 140, 169, 287, 351, 374, 376 Far from the Madding Crowd (1967) 196 feature films 22, 53, 55, 112, 138–142, 144, 202, 203, 289, 292, 299, 301, 314, 321, 331, 339, 367 Federal Trade Commission (FTC) 203, 205, 210–213 féerie 323 Fein, Seth 259 fiction 52, 53, 314, 335, 351 film as commodity 271–272 film clubs 307 film criticism 97, 138, 368 film cycles 136, 270, 272, 274, 296–303, 339

film genres 28, 61, 62, 265, 294, 296–297, 307, 321, 323, 331, 351, 380 “Film Girl,” 69, 81 n.42 film historiography 13, 16, 31, 96, 123, 204 film history 16, 31, 39, 41, 78, 86, 123, 130, 132, 204, 232, 245, 270, 296, 298, 299, 302, 319–322, 325, 327, 329–339, 341, 379, 387. See also cinema history, new cinema history feminist film history 203 film industry 5, 40, 53, 88, 90, 94, 144, 148, 149, 173, 176, 187, 188, 202, 204, 205, 213, 221, 259, 265, 271, 273, 287, 288, 307, 308, 312, 315, 367 film policy 97, 108 film popularity 5, 8, 59, 68, 84, 98, 121, 132, 188, 191, 233, 259, 270–272, 277–280, 282, 285, 288–290, 305, 319, 325, 329, 331, 335, 343, 382, 388, 389, 392 film prints 55, 57, 60, 142, 220, 230, 233, 321 film production 2, 14, 22, 43, 46, 52, 56, 66, 75, 84, 91, 97, 102, 117, 136, 141, 142, 149, 150, 152, 153, 156, 161, 162, 166, 173–176, 187, 196, 202, 204, 213, 214, 232, 259, 264, 270, 271, 281, 287, 288, 292, 293, 296–298, 300–303, 306, 307, 310, 312, 314, 315, 320–327, 333, 336, 345, 346, 349, 362, 368, 380 film studies 1, 2, 4, 7, 9, 17, 21, 28–31, 39, 40, 41, 51, 96, 101, 123–125, 130, 297–299, 302, 341, 356, 379, 387–389, 391, 393 film style 2, 96 film supply see distribution film theory 14, 30, 31, 34, 39, 40, 319, 320, 356–357 apparatus theory 319 feminist film theory 5, 14, 28, 30, 39 psychoanalytic film theory 5, 14, 30–31, 34–35, 39, 52, 341 film trade press 19, 24, 53, 54, 61, 65, 68, 69, 72, 80, 84–86, 88–94, 98, 99, 138–145, 148, 163, 174, 177, 181, 203, 239, 272, 297, 299–302, 326 Film Weekly 221, 230 Filma 334 films, family 300 First Methodist Episcopal Church (Bakersfield, California) 57–60 First National 74, 90 first-run theaters see motion picture theaters. See also distribution Fixer, The (1968) 196 Flanders 99, 101, 102, 109, 255, 384 Flash Gordon 298 Ford Motor Company 70, 82 foreign market. See also exports 140, 143, 147–149, 153, 298

400

Index Fortuna di Essere Donna, La (1956) 222 Fortune magazine 169, 290 Fox Film Company 49, 72, 73, 152, 154, 176, 178, 179, 181, 218, 221, 222, 249, 259, 274, 288, 289 Foxes of Harrow, The (1947) 221 France 39, 40, 43, 67, 126, 128, 129, 131, 132, 149, 155, 156, 248, 307, 323, 392 French cinema 132 Frisco Kid, The (1935) 293, 294 Fu Manchu 298 Fuller-Seeley, Kathryn 3, 66, 79, 92, 112–122, 124, 140, 164, 203, 205, 211, 281, 367, 379 Fulton, Albert R. 40 Fun in Acapulco (1963) 223 Gaelic 50 Gaines, Jane 202, 204, 214, 367 Gallup poll 167, 168 Garbo, Greta 170 Garncarz, Joseph 255 Gastonia, NC 20, 25 gender 69, 94, 139, 202, 203, 205, 207, 211, 212, 229, 309, 313, 347, 349, 350, 361 genres see film genres Geographical Information Systems 55, 199, 200, 203, 205 geography 3, 6, 33, 46, 51, 113, 200, 202, 203, 211–213, 217, 241 cultural geography 163, 199, 379 Georg, Odile 8 German film 139, 140, 143, 150, 335, 339 Germany 9, 109, 139, 142–145, 157, 307, 324, 339 Ghent 13, 42–44, 57, 109, 331, 381, 384 Ginzburg, Carlo 7, 35, 125, 343, 387, 388, 392 Girl with Green Eyes, The (1964) 196 glamour 288 Gledhill, Christine 31 Glen, Patrick 14, 43 globalization 51, 213 Globe Film 333 Godfather, The (1972) 194 “Going to the Show,” 16 Göktürk, Deniz 324 Goldfinger (1964) 221 Goldwyn, Samuel 157, 278, 292–294, 346 Gomery, Douglas 2, 5, 16, 31, 96, 124, 136, 147–158, 173, 175, 205, 264, 288, 320, 365, 379 Gone with the Wind (1939) 297 Goodbye Mr. Chips (1968) 194 Goodman, Benny 301 Google Maps 18 Google Ngram Viewer 86 Graduate, The (1967) 194 Grandais, Suzanne 139

Great Depression, the 92, 136, 259 Great Train Robbery (1903) 120 Greater Union cinema circuit 218–222, 225 Griffith, D.W. 14, 23, 41–42, 74, 375 Groningen 157, 332, 334 Guidacci, Margherita 391 Gunning, Tom 78, 255, 307, 319–322 Gunning, “Wid,” 78 Hague, the 332, 333, 335 Hahn, Elizabeth 357 Half a Sixpence (1967) 196 Hamlet (1900) 326 Hampton, Benjamin 40, 209, 375 Hamtramck 70, 72, 77 Hanich, Julian 355–359, 362, 379 Hannan, Brian 330, 335 Hansen, Miriam 307, 320, 321, 355, 379, 380 Hanssen, F. Andrew 289 HAP Film Company 335, 339 Harris, Genevieve 72 Hart, William S. 72 Harvard Business Review 165 Hatari (1962) 222 Hauptmann, Gerhart 139, 324 Hawick 48–50 Hays Office see Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America Hays, Walter 89 Hays, Will H. 148, 150, 162, 165 Headrick, Daniel R. 233 Hearts of the World (1918) 74 Hepburn, Audrey 348 Hercules, Samson and Ulysses (1963) 222 Hertz, Carl 236, 238 Hipkins, Danielle 3, 341, 344–345, 389 historical poetics 320 historiography 3, 6–8, 13, 19, 30, 46, 66, 100, 108, 124–126, 128, 199, 200, 244, 245, 341, 388 history: counterfactual history 213 economic history 3, 78, 79 ethnohistory 14, 28, 33, 97 local history 47–53, 203–205, 214 microhistory 4, 7, 18, 35, 44, 57–59, 60, 88, 97, 99, 124, 125, 132, 187, 196, 199, 229 oral history 4, 5, 13, 14, 28, 29, 44, 98, 101, 108, 109, 129, 342, 344–350, 378, 379, 382 people’s history 202, 213, 214 social history 3, 6, 10, 13, 16, 24, 33, 51, 52, 66, 88, 97, 124–126, 129, 131, 133, 254, 321 History of Moviegoing Exhibition and Reception network 3, 9 n.1, 10 n.4, 16, 26 n.2, 42–43, 109 n1

401

Index Hollywood 2, 17, 39–42, 52, 60, 92, 121, 136, 143, 147–149, 151, 155, 156, 159, 161, 166, 168, 173, 176, 179, 187, 191, 194, 196, 202, 204, 205, 213, 255, 258, 259, 261, 263, 265, 281, 287, 288, 293, 296–302, 305, 330, 335, 351, 368, 369, 373 Hollywood and Everyday Life Conference (2003) 42 Hollywood and Its Spectators Conference (1998) 41–42 Hollywood Hotel (1937) 301 home movies 37, 307 home video 37, 225 HoMER see History of Moviegoing Exhibition and Reception network Howe, Lyman 113, 117, 208 Hoyt, Eric 65, 66, 72, 80, 81, 83–95, 330, 335 Hoyt, Harold R. 72, 81 n.43 Hoyts cinemas 218, 221, 222, 225, 230 Hubbard, Phil 98, 380, 383 Huettig, Mae 162, 163, 175 Hughes, Stephen Putnam 8, 84, 342, 355–364 humanities 3, 4, 17, 21, 25, 29, 33, 65, 85, 96, 97, 101, 122 Hygiene der Ehe (Marital Hygiene 1922) 312, 333 I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang (1932) 41 ideology 2, 96, 342, 365, 366, 373 in movie advertising 365–377 If You Could Only Cook (1935) 292 illustrated songs 22, 117–119, 367 immigrants 69, 70, 77, 257. See also migration Importing Asta Nielsen Database (IANDb) 138, 142–145, 327 independent producers 149, 152, 153, 155, 170, 292 India 43, 236, 355, 357, 360 Indian audiences 360 Indonesia, colonial (Netherlands Indies) 199, 200, 232–235, 240, 242. See also Jakarta, Java industrialization 102, 310 interdisciplinarity 3, 6, 7, 44, 296 intermediality 14, 22 Iowa 19, 30, 66, 92, 112, 113, 115–117, 119, 120, 202 Israel 32 Istanbul 200, 247, 251 It’s in the Air (1938) 335 Italian cinema 343, 344, 351, 352, 387, 388 Italy 77, 149, 156, 272, 273, 282, 341–344, 387–392 itinerant exhibition see exhibition Izant, Robert J. 71–2 Izmir 200, 246, 251

Jackson, Peter 323 Jacobs, Lea 41, 320, 321 Jacobs, Lewis 40 Jakarta (Batavia) 232, 234–236, 238, 239, 241 Java 200, 232–242 Jaws 183 Jim Crow see segregation jitterbug films 296, 298–302 Johnston, Claire 30 Johnston, Eric 148, 149, 151, 155–157 Jones, Janna 380 Jones, Matthew 14, 33, 43 journalism 69, 78, 375 Jung, Uli 139, 142, 323, 326, 327 Jurca, Catherine 98, 270, 281, 285, 287–295 Kansas 116, 165, 168 Kaya, Dilek 200, 244–253 Keightley, Emily 32, 33 Kelly, Kitty 69, 79 n.2, 81 n.42, 368 Kelly, Mary 31 Kessler, Frank 270, 319–328 Kinoreform 325 Kitchen, Karl K. 72 Klenotic, Jeffrey 4, 55, 163, 169, 199, 200, 202–216, 234 Klinger, Barbara 6, 205, 379, 380 Klondike Annie (1936) 293 Knight, Arthur 23, 42, 56, 59 Knight, Arthur (The Liveliest Art) 40 Koloniaal Verslag 239 Königswalzer (1935) 335 Kossmann, Ernst 101 Krämer, Peter 56, 255 Krupa, Gene 302 Kuhn, Annette 4, 13, 14, 24, 28–37, 43, 97, 101, 281, 299, 309, 347, 349, 353, 356, 379 Kunsky, John 76, 77 Lacan, Jacques 39 Lake, Veronica 349 Lancelot and Guinevere (1963) 223 Lantern 10 n.4, 65, 83–6, 89 Laredo, TX 201, 254–266 Larkin, Brian 8, 363 Larsen, Viggo 139 Latin America 10, 99, 108, 139, 259 Lauder, Harry 53 Law of the Lawless (1964) 222 Lawrence of Arabia (1962) 221 Le Roy Ladurie, Emmanuel 7, 126 Leather Boys, The (1964) 196 Leenders, Mark 187 Lefebvre, Henri 302 Legion of Decency 159 Leichte Kavallerie (1935) 335 Leiden 332, 334, 338

402

Index leisure 65, 66, 79, 108, 109, 125, 130, 141, 176, 202, 227, 365, 367, 380–383 Lenk, Sabine 270, 319–328 Levantine 246, 249 Linder, Max 139 Litman, Barry 187 locations 4, 6, 52, 53, 56, 60, 69, 104–107, 164, 174, 183, 189, 196, 199, 218, 230, 255, 264, 313, 349, 369 Lockett, Andrew 42 Loew, Marcus 85, 89, 90–91 Loew’s/MGM Film 150, 151, 154 Loew’s Inc. 175, 178–180, 218, 288, 368 Loiperdinger, Martin 138–146 Lord Jim (1965) 194 Lord of the Rings Trilogy (2001–2003) 323 Los Angeles 23, 75, 92, 165, 257, 259, 265, 302 Lozano, José Carlos 99, 201, 254–267 L-Shaped Room, The (1963) 188, 196 MacDonald, Jeanette 43, 289 Macgowan, Kenneth 40 MacLean, Malcolm S. Jr. 391 Madison, WI 30, 40, 59, 84, 86, 94 Madras 342, 357–363 magazines 8, 40, 86, 310 magic lantern shows 112, 124, 255 Maingard, Jacqueline 33 major motion picture companies 136, 157, 163, 287–290 Maltby, Richard 1–12, 16–27, 41–44, 51, 56, 57, 59, 60, 88, 97–99, 101, 112, 123, 124–126, 130, 132, 136, 159–172, 173, 175, 200, 202, 204, 214, 217–231, 233, 281, 296, 303, 320, 341, 356, 380, 388 Malthête, Jacques 323 Manhattan 16, 42, 92, 105, 177, 179, 181 Manheimer, John 89 Mann, Arthur 49 Mannoni, Laurent 323 Marache, Corinne 129, 130 market research 390 marketing see distribution Marsh, W. Ward 72, 80 n.21 Marshall Plan 156, 389 Marshall, Herbert 292 Martin, Rosy 32 Masarykův lidovýchovný ústav (Masaryk’s Educational Institute) 311 Masquerade (1965) 196 mass culture 125, 367 Massey, Doreen 98, 211, 379 Mast, Gerald 40 Mathijs, Ernest 323, 346 matinees see exhibition Mayer, Arthur 40 Mayer, Ruth 286, 298, 301

mayfly films 270, 329–339 McKenzie, Jordi 190 Medan 236, 239–241 Media History Digital Library 10, 65, 83–89, 92, 94, 300 media industry studies 84 media studies 84, 199, 305, 341, 387 medical films 307, 312 Meers, Philippe 1–12, 16–27, 29, 36, 42–44, 56, 57, 66, 96–111, 112, 124, 125, 245, 246, 255, 320, 356, 380, 388 Melbourne 142, 222, 230 Méliès, George 119, 270, 322, 323 melodrama 351, 371 memories of cinema see cinema memory memory studies 3–5, 13, 14, 29, 32, 33, 299 memory text 29 memory work 14, 29, 32, 33, 35, 36 Mendras, Henri 128 Mercer, John 307 Metro cinemas 218, 221–224, 313, 314 Metro production company 92, 218, 221–224 Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM) 150–152, 154, 174–176, 194, 196, 218, 221–223, 229, 258, 278, 288–294, 297, 300, 302, 329, 335 Metropolitan Film Company 75, 77 Metz, Christian 34, 39, 142, 143 Mexico 10, 99, 109, 254–260, 263 Mexico City 254, 256, 258 Meyer, Fred S. 85, 93 MGM see Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Mickey Mouse 298 microhistory see history middle-class 23, 74, 105, 144, 163, 194, 202, 263, 342, 353, 365, 366, 390. See also class Midkiff Debauche, Leslie 264 Midnight Cowboy (1969) 194 migration. See also immigrants 70, 132, 203 Minnesota 116, 117 Missouri 116 Mitchell, Brian R. 235, 297 modernity 47, 48, 50, 124, 128, 132, 365, 392 modernity thesis 47, 124 modernization 66, 102, 126 Moitra, Stefan 56 Monogram 165, 261 Monterrey 99 Moore, Paul S. 8, 57, 79, 119, 139, 342, 365–377 Moralı, Nail 249 Moretti, Franco 53 Moss, B.S. 85, 89–91, 94 Mothers of France (Mères de France 1917) 326 Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) 148–150, 157 Motion Picture Exhibitors League (MPEL) 208–210, 212

403

Index Motion Picture Export Association (MPEA) 136, 147–157, 209 Motion Picture Herald 159–161, 164, 165–170, 176, 177, 180, 294, 300, 302 Motion Picture Patents Company (MPPC) 367 Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America (MPPDA) 148, 165 motion picture theaters 8, 14, 17, 19, 22, 25, 40, 49, 55–57, 59, 60, 61, 69, 71, 74, 75, 77, 78, 81, 89, 92–94, 109, 113, 114, 118, 120, 121, 124, 125, 129, 136, 137, 139, 144, 151, 156, 160, 163, 167, 168, 170, 173–181, 184, 188–191, 194, 196, 200, 203, 206–213, 245–251, 253, 256–262, 264, 265, 270, 287, 288, 289, 292–294, 306–314, 315, 325, 326, 329, 331, 332, 338, 339, 342, 357, 358, 360, 362, 363, 367–369, 375, 382, 388–391 airdomes 121 architecture 199, 329, 379, 380, 383, 384 balconies 19, 248 cinema halls 357, 360 de luxe theaters 163, 166 fires in 76, 211, 240, 246, 248, 250, 251, 257, 311 first-run theaters 93, 163, 175, 189, 259, 264, 288, 289, 292–294 in Chicago 187, 191–196 in Cleveland 74–75 in Detroit 72–74, 76–77 live entertainment in 136, 164, 255, 258, 263, 292, 302 live music in 302 local and parish halls as theaters 59, 130–132, 219, 239, 249 managers 17, 25, 40, 94, 113, 160, 167, 203, 205, 210–212. See also exhibitors metropolitan theaters 175 motion picture theater chains 57, 78, 79, 143, 187, 201, 203, 210, 218, 255, 260, 262, 264, 281, 288, 368, 392 multiplex theaters 163, 183, 190, 194, 196, 200, 217, 227, 379–383 neighborhood theaters 72, 78, 105, 136, 164, 165, 173, 174, 180–182, 259, 263, 298, 376, 381 nickelodeons 16, 42, 57, 68, 112, 113, 120, 159. See also storefront cinemas permanent cinemas 130, 241 picture palaces 50, 61, 177, 188, 194, 199 picture shows 55, 56, 61, 200, 205, 234, 239, 241, 242, 366 seating capacity 104, 105, 189, 191, 221, 225, 242, 248, 273, 274, 362 second-run theaters 161, 174, 288, 290, 291 storefront cinemas 18, 20–22, 120. See also nickeodeons

suburban theaters 56, 311 tent shows 129, 238, 239 touring and travelling shows see exhibition: itinerant exhibition. See also exhibitors ushers 161, 383 Motion Picture Theatre Owners of America (MPTOA) 89, 91, 93, 210, 211, 264 Mottram, Ron 324 Mouloudji, Marcel 130 movie contests 74, 78, 211, 320, 359 movie directories, in newspapers 342, 365–376 moviegoing 19, 47, 52, 55, 59, 104, 106, 108, 109, 121, 163, 169, 176, 196, 202, 232, 240, 242, 251, 254, 308, 319, 320, 321, 323, 325, 327, 330, 332, 336, 342, 343, 357, 365–367, 369, 373, 375, 376, 379–381, 387–389, 391, 392. See also cinemagoing, experiences of cinema and consumption 2, 4, 7, 13, 14, 49–51, 57, 79, 97, 123, 124, 126, 184, 187, 218, 219, 222, 226, 227, 230, 242, 264, 272, 298–300, 302, 303, 305, 310, 342, 365–377, 378, 380, 381, 387–390, 392 as families 365–367, 370–375 Moving Picture Age 61 Moving Picture World 88, 90, 91, 208 MPAA see Motion Picture Association of America MPEA see Motion Picture Export Association MPPDA see Motion Picture Producers and Distributors Association of America multiplex theaters see motion picture theaters Mulvey, Laura 31, 39 Münsterberg, Hugo 5, 10, 247 musicals 22, 36, 58, 109, 129, 130, 141, 144, 242, 255, 292, 300–301, 302, 323, 335 Mutual Film Corporation v. Industrial Commission of Ohio (1915) 162, 375 Muvahhit, Bedia 251 My Four Years in Germany (1918) 74 Napierkowska, Stacia 139 Napper, Lawrence 2 Nash, Ilana 300 national cinemas 20, 49, 52, 100, 308, 351, 380 national culture 259, 313 national identity 52, 244, 310, 390 National Recovery Act 163–165, 176 Nazimova 73 NBB see Nederlandse Bioscoopbond Nebraska 92, 116 Nebuschka, Lissi 140 NECS see European Network for Cinema and Media Studies Nederlandse Bioscoopbond (NBB, Netherlands Cinema Union) 103, 104, 147–157

404

Index neorealism 351 Netherlands, the 4, 60, 97, 100–104, 107, 109, 126, 136, 142, 145, 147, 149–152, 154, 156, 157, 200, 232–237, 241, 270, 285, 330–333, 335, 336, 339 Cinema market 147 Netherlands government 103, 150, 151, 156 Netherlands Fox Film Corp. 150, 151–152 new cinema history 1–7, 9, 10, 13, 14, 17, 20, 21, 26, 29, 33, 36, 44, 46, 47, 51, 55, 65, 66, 84, 96–99, 108, 112, 123–125, 130, 132, 138, 161, 199, 245, 246, 251, 269, 270, 287, 288, 296–299, 301–303, 305, 319, 320, 329, 341, 344, 352, 356, 366, 378, 380. See also cinema history, film history New Hampshire 118, 199, 203, 205–208, 210 New Hollywood 191, 194, 196 New York 6, 20, 48, 61, 79, 88–92, 118, 119, 125, 164, 165, 173–175, 177–184, 189, 261, 265, 297, 301, 327 New York Theater Owners Chamber of Commerce (NYOCC) 88, 89, 91, 92 newspaper advertisements see advertisements newspaper reviews see reviews newspapers 3, 8, 10, 13, 17–24, 44, 47–49, 51, 58, 69, 119, 120, 122, 125, 126, 129, 135, 138–145, 207, 211, 246–248, 265, 266, 272, 326, 367, 381. See also advertising as primary sources 57, 58 local 19, 20, 48, 58, 66, 119, 120, 138–146, 148, 207, 246–248, 250, 255, 258, 260, 261, 263, 266 on microfilm 22, 68, 78 Newspapers.com 20 newsreels, local 75–77 Newsweek 166 nickelodeons see motion picture theaters Nicoli, Marina 10, 271–286 Nielsen, Asta 9, 138–145, 323, 326 Nielsen, Ida 144 Nigeria 8 Nohain, Jean 130 nontheatrical cinema see cinema nontheatrical distribution see distribution nontheatrical exhibition see exhibition Nordisk 139, 141, 270, 324, 325 Norman, George 190 North Carolina 13, 14, 18–21, 23–25, 356 Nothing but the Best (1964) 196 nouvelle histoire, la 6 Nowell-Smith, Geoffrey 51–52 Oban 48–51 Oban Times 47, 50 Object Relations (OR) psychoanalysis 35 Ochs, Lee A. 89 Odeon cinemas 222, 223, 277

Oklahoma 92, 116, 257, 261, 262 oligopoly 161, 176 Oliver! (1968) 187, 194 Olsen, Ole 325 opera houses 17, 74, 112, 113, 116–118, 120, 121, 205, 257 O’Rawe, Catherine 344–354 oral history see history orality 346, 347 Orel sporting organization 311 Ozone cinemas 217, 219, 220–222, 226 Pafort-Overduin, Clara 60, 98, 100, 101, 136, 147–158, 255, 285, 330, 337 Palestine 32, 61 Palfreyman, David 161, 165, 170 Paramount case 136, 176, 181 Paramount Pictures 49, 60, 72, 80, 136, 150, 152, 154, 157, 160, 163, 173, 175, 176, 179, 181, 194, 196, 205, 208, 210, 218, 220–223, 259, 261, 275, 277, 278, 288–290, 292, 293, 300–302, 313, 320, 367, 369 Paramount-Artcraft 72, 80, 209–211, 367 Paris 48, 75, 128–132, 200, 232, 233, 246–250, 333, 335, 339 Paris chante toujours (Paris Still Sings 1951) 130 Parker, Sir Gilbert 369 Parsons, Louella 69, 72 participant observation 5, 6, 246 Pasolini, Pier Paolo 391 Passion plays 22, 58 Pathé serials 74 Pathé-Frères 68 Patterson, Frances Taylor 369 Pautz, Michelle 261 Payne Fund studies 5–6, 10 n.7 PCA see Production Code Peck, Gregory 130 pedagogy 25 Peggy (1916) 53 Peiss, Kathy 125 Perret, Léonce 333 Pett, Emma 14, 43 Pettijohn, Charles 161 phenomenology 342, 355, 356, 358, 362, 391 Philadelphia 98, 165, 281–282, 285, 288–290, 292, 293, 294 photography 14, 29, 31–33, 35–37, 245 Piaf, Édith 130–132 Pickering, Michael 32 picture showmen see exhibitors picture shows see motion picture theaters pillarization 102 Pinna, Luca 391 plays 22, 117, 139, 164, 165, 166, 173, 174, 176, 178, 181, 182, 222, 226, 233, 251, 287, 293, 294, 331, 336, 355, 360, 362, 374

405

Index Polaire 139 POPSTAT Index of Popularity 188, 277, 285, 331 popular culture 28, 29, 43 popularity see film popularity population 19, 34, 42, 48, 57, 58, 69, 70, 78, 104, 106, 107, 109, 115, 116, 128, 129, 132, 145, 200, 207, 222, 223, 225, 242, 246, 254, 255, 257–259, 261, 263, 265, 272, 274, 282, 314, 332, 391 Portelli, Alessandro 345–347 Porten, Henny 140 Porter, Edwin S. 320, 321 postcards 128, 129, 131 Potamianos, George 264 Powdermaker, Hortense 357 premieres 76, 173, 174, 177–182, 273, 307, 311, 380 press see newspapers press books see advertising prestige pictures 297, 298, 302 price discrimination 174 Pride of the Clan, The (1917) 53 Priscilla (1912) 73 Production Code 41 programming see exhibition Progressive Movement 70 Project Arclight 84, 86, 89, 94. See also Arclight Proletkult 313 ProQuest 20, 85 Psilander, Valdemar 139, 140 public sphere 30, 298, 302, 307, 312–314, 355, 375, 391 Puglia 344, 349, 350, 391 quality films 182, 211, 270, 289, 292, 294 Quaresima, Leonardo 324, 327 Questione Meridionale (Southern Question) 390 questionnaires 31, 344, 346, 352 Quigley, Martin 92, 159, 160, 182, 183 quotas 136 race 41, 69, 196, 200, 233 racism 19. See also segregation radio 87, 126, 131, 178, 292, 301, 326, 373, 374, 389 Radio-Keith-Orpheum (RKO) 150, 152, 154, 179, 180, 261, 278, 288, 289, 292, 293 railways 128, 235, 236, 237 Ramsaye, Terry 40 Rank 222, 223 Ranke, Leopold von 40 Rea, George 91, 373, 392 reception 4, 9, 10, 14, 19, 22, 23, 29, 33, 41–44, 47, 51, 52, 66, 84, 98, 119, 124, 130, 138, 202, 203, 241, 245, 270, 296, 298, 300, 302, 319, 322, 324–326, 333, 341, 355. See also audiences recreation 144, 242

Red Cross 76, 308 Regal Entertainment Group 262 regulation 30, 41, 112, 173, 306, 308, 309, 312, 315 Reid, Anthony 235 release patterns see distribution religion 102, 108 religious performance 18 rental see distribution Republic Pictures 244, 249, 251, 292 Republican Party (U.S.) 70, 71 Resha, David 85 reviews 30, 48, 68, 79, 297, 302, 331, 365, 368. See also newspapers Rimmer, Peter J. 235 Rivista del Cinematografo 390 RKO see Radio-Keith-Orpheum Road to Hong Kong, The (1962) 177–179, 181 roadshows see exhibition Robb & Rowley (R&R) 256–266 Robinson, Edward G. 293, 294 Rodowick, David 320 romantic comedies 220, 389 Rosas Mantecón, Ana 260 Rosenzweig, Roy 4, 16, 21, 125 Rotten to the Core (1965) 196 Rotterdam 66, 96, 100, 104–109, 332, 334, 338 Rowley, Jack 266 Rubin, Miri 51, 353 n.6 runs see distribution Ruppin, Dafna 200, 232–243 Sadoul, Georges 325 Saharet 139 Said, Edward 23 Saint-Benin-des-Bois 126–132 saloons 293 Sardinia 344, 346, 391 saturation release see distribution scaled entity search (SES) 84, 87, 88, 90–92, 94 Scarlett Empress, The (1934) 313 Scarperia 391 Schatz. Thomas 41, 168, 175 Scheiner, Georganne 300 Schutz, Alfred 356, 357 Schwartz, A.H. 89 Scotland 9, 14, 43, 46, 48, 50, 52–54, 208 Scott, Walter 53 Screen 16, 28, 30, 31, 34, 37, 39, 40, 51, 61, 72, 75, 80, 81, 202, 230, 255, 330, 331 screenings see exhibition second-run theaters see motion picture theaters Second World War see World War II Sedgwick, John 10, 56, 59, 98, 100, 101, 149, 188, 271–286, 288, 330, 331, 337, 339, 379 segregation, racial 19, 23, 263, 381. See also motion picture theaters, racism Jim Crow 23

406

Index semiotics 39, 342 serendipity 4, 14, 20, 24 serial films 360, 367 seriality 270, 296, 298–299, 302, 303 serials 6, 125, 296, 298, 299, 302, 303, 360, 361, 367 series 6, 10, 41–43, 72, 105, 109, 118, 130, 139, 140, 142–145, 176, 181, 189, 190, 196, 221, 226, 241, 270, 281, 297–301, 331, 351, 365, 366, 368, 369, 371, 373, 374, 376 Serna, Laura Isabelle 263 Shackleford Metcalfe, Lyne 60 Shaw, Artie 302 Shetland Times 50 shopping malls 107, 217, 225, 226 short films 78, 121, 139, 140, 142–144, 244, 247, 258, 272, 298, 301, 323, 332, 333, 339 Showing Movies for Profit—in School and Church (1919) 60 showmen see exhibitors Sicily 344, 350, 391 silent cinema 68, 69, 71, 75, 77–79, 81 Sine-Fono 143, 144 Singapore 21, 234–236, 240, 242 Singer, Ben 16, 105, 106 Skouras, Spyros 166, 167, 179, 181, 290 Slide, Anthony 56, 307 small gauge film 307, 314–315 small town exhibition see exhibition Smyrna 200, 246–251 Snelson, Tim 270, 296–304 Sobchack, Vivian 356 social anthropology 3, 8 social history see history social practice 13, 17, 19, 57, 123 social sciences 3, 30, 33, 65, 66, 96, 97, 132 sociality 8, 57, 59, 163, 356, 358, 361, 363, 378, 379, 380, 383, 384 sociology 6, 10, 28–31, 61, 97 Sokol sporting organization 311 Some Like It Hot (1939) 300, 302 Song of the Thin Man (1947) 221 sound cinema 230, 329, 333, 335, 338 space 1–3, 6, 8, 33–36, 48, 57, 58, 83, 98, 99, 101, 107, 120, 125, 129, 140, 163, 199, 200, 204, 205, 207, 213, 214, 222, 246–248, 307–309, 313, 315, 342, 349, 355, 359, 361–363, 379, 383, 384, 391 Spanish-language films 258–261, 263 spatiality 234, 356, 379 spectators 6, 14, 31, 39, 51, 52, 341, 348, 356, 358, 360. See also audiences, viewers spectatorship 2, 5, 28, 29, 31, 34, 35, 39, 40, 56, 321, 356, 357 Spiegel, Max 89 Srinivas, Lakshmi 357, 363 Stacey, Janet 4, 31, 348, 379 Staiger, Janet 41, 355

Stamp, Shelley 202, 203 Standard Exhibition Contract 60, 162, 175 Stanfield, Peter 296–299, 302 Star cinemas 49, 220, 222 star system 66, 84, 94, 96, 138, 140, 142, 214 emergence of 138–46 stardom 142, 144, 288, 325, 345, 347 stars 43, 66, 68, 71, 72, 74, 78, 84, 87, 91, 94, 96, 126, 130–132, 135, 138–146, 159, 160, 174, 190, 202, 214, 257, 259, 287, 288, 292–294, 297, 299, 300, 301, 323, 325, 326, 335, 341, 342, 345, 347–351, 368, 371, 376 early stars 138–146 steam shipping 234 Steedman, Carolyn 31 stereopticons 22, 66, 112, 117, 119, 255 Stern, Joseph 89 Sternberg, Josef von 312, 320, 321 Stokes, Melvyn 3, 14, 16, 23, 33, 34, 39–45, 51, 55, 281, 356, 388 Stornoway 51 Stowe, David 301 Strachey, Lytton 46, 53 Streetcar Named Desire, A (1951) 348 studio system 173, 174, 205, 214 suburban theaters see motion picture theaters suburbanization 106, 108, 173, 176 suffrage 70, 203, 205, 359 Sumatra 200, 234–236, 240–242 Sunday schools 15, 58–60 Supreme Court 136, 162, 163, 165, 173, 176, 184, 375 Surabaya 235, 236, 238, 239, 241 surveys 10, 31, 43, 169, 200, 228, 229, 232, 244, 246, 342, 352, 378, 381, 384 Swanson, Gillian 31 Swanson, Gloria 349 swing (music) 297, 300–302 Swing High Swing Low (1937) 301 Swing Sister Swing (1938) 300 talking pictures see sound cinema taxes 104, 238. See also entertainment taxes taxi dance halls 6 Taylor, Diana 351, 352 Taylor, Jean G. 233 technology 4, 33, 47, 55, 58, 85, 121, 200, 225, 233–235, 241, 242, 247, 309, 325, 333, 352, 379 Teddy Bears, The (1906) 320 television 16, 36, 50, 55, 87, 125, 126, 130, 131, 182, 183, 221, 222, 225, 307, 315, 326, 331, 341, 343, 382, 383, 388–390, 392 pay television 226 Tello, Jaime 260 tent shows see motion picture theaters Tentori, Tullio 391

407

Index terrazas 99 Texas 59, 116, 201, 254–257, 260–263, 265 That Touch of Mink (1962) 223 Thaw, Harry 20 theater chains see motion picture theaters theory see film theory Thiesi 391 Thissen, Judith 3, 66, 67, 98, 100, 101, 123–133, 232, 305 Thompson, E.P. 40, 123, 125 Thompson, Kristin 232, 281, 323 Thorp, Margaret 300 Thorsen, Isak 141, 325, 327 ticket prices see exhibition Tilly, Charles 124 Tinee, Mae 69, 72 Titmuss, R.M. 29 Tjasmadi, H. M. Johan 232 To Hell with the Kaiser (1918) 74 To Kill a Mockingbird (1962) 179, 223 Tofighian, Nadi 234–236, 241, 242 Tom Jones (1963) 221 topical films, local 25, 52 topography 349, 351 touring shows see exhibition: itinerant exhibition. See also exhibitors trade press see film trade press trade screenings 53 trams 105, 219, 235, 238, 239 transport 50, 136, 199, 200, 217, 219, 222, 225, 229, 234, 235, 240, 391 public 108, 161, 218–220, 222, 225, 238 urban 217, 234, 238 travelling show see exhibition: itinerant exhibition. See also exhibitors travelogues 119 Trenet, Charles 130 Treumann, Wanda 139 Treveri Gennari, Daniela 3, 147, 273, 278, 285, 341, 344–354, 379, 389, 390 Trip to the Moon, A (Voyage dans la lune 1902) 270, 322–324, 327 Trove 21, 26, 141 Turkey 43, 199, 200, 244–246, 249, 251 Tuschinski Theater 331 Twentieth Century Fox 288 Twitter 84 U.S. Department of Justice 174, 176, 181–182 Ulin, J. 217, 218 Unbeliever, The (1918) 73 Union-Theater cinemas 143 United Artists 40–41, 86, 90, 148, 150, 152, 157, 173, 177–179, 182, 194, 196, 221, 222, 260, 261, 274, 289, 292, 346 United Artists Theaters, Inc 260–261

United Kingdom see Britain United States of America 37, 147–149, 157, 162, 199, 201, 203, 208, 235, 254, 255, 335 Universal Pictures 74, 90, 93, 150, 152, 157, 178, 179, 183, 218, 222, 223, 261, 289, 292, 293, 298, 300, 302, 368 University of the Third Age 344 Unwritten Law, The (1907) 20 Urania association 311 urban development 229, 391 urban studies 3 urbanization 105, 222 useful cinema 84, 305, 307 Utrecht 332, 334 Van de Vijver, Lies 378–386 van der Velden, André 232 Van Oort, Thunnis 96–11, 149 Variety 49, 90, 137, 149, 150, 151, 165, 167, 170, 173, 174, 176–182, 189, 190–192, 196, 300, 301 variety theaters 2, 6, 14, 21, 48–50, 55, 61, 91, 99, 103, 117, 118, 130, 139, 144, 157, 176, 194, 200, 202, 234, 236, 241, 305, 320, 323, 357, 359, 366–368, 375, 378 vaudeville 17, 66, 68, 90, 116, 118, 121, 124, 159, 170, 232, 257–259, 262, 263, 367 Verhoeven, Deb 3, 60, 136, 187–197, 222, 230 Vermont 118, 210 Verne, Jules 323 vertical integration 150, 176, 212, 214, 265, 289 video interviews 344, 347 viewers 342, 355, 357. See also audiences, spectators villages 25, 67, 117, 125, 126, 128, 129, 132, 245, 349 Walker, Dylan 98, 200, 214, 217–231 Waller, Gregory 5, 14, 15, 55–63, 79, 112, 113, 281, 264 Wallin, Zoë 136, 173–186 Wallis Cinemas 217, 225–230 Walls, W. David 190 Walsh, Mike 60, 98, 200, 214, 217–231 Walturdaw 143 war films 73, 339 Warner Bros. 41, 150, 152, 166, 179, 218, 274, 288–292, 294, 300, 347, 348, 350 Warner, Jack L. 166 Washington DC 73, 74, 76, 112, 116, 119–121, 368 Wasson, Haidee 7, 56, 205, 305, 307, 308 Waters, H. Lee 25 Watson, Thomas 85, 86

408

Index weather 50, 99, 116, 119, 130, 234, 238 Weber, Lois 78, 81 Weber, Max 97 Welsh, Phillip H. 78 West Indies 299 West, Mae 293 westerns 70, 105, 217, 218, 222, 298, 299, 315 “What the Picture Did for Me,” 92–93 White, Hayden 47, 48, 74, 247, 289 Wild and Wooly (1917) 74 Williams, Raymond 40, 299 Williamsburg 23, 56, 115 Wilson, Woodrow 70, 211 window see distribution Winnicott, Donald 35 Wintergarten, Berlin 323 Woolf, Virginia 1, 2, 7

World War I 40, 48, 51, 70, 76, 138, 139, 142, 143, 145, 150, 203, 232, 244, 248, 250, 306, 310, 319, 369 World War II 29, 104, 105, 107, 108, 126, 136, 147, 149, 152, 176, 259, 311, 314, 315, 334, 381, 389 Wrong Arm of the Law, The (1963) 223 Wuthering Heights (1939) 346 yearbooks 88, 91 Yellow Rolls Royce, The (1964) 223 Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA) 59, 248, 308 Zobu, Vasfi R. 251 zones see distribution Zukor, Adolph 91, 203, 210

409