A D V E N T U R E S   in   C Y B E R S O U N D

The Coming of the Cinema by Stephen Bottomore

Sea-spray, express trains, undressed young ladies:

"some of the images assaulting - and in some cases alarming - the senses of fin-de-siecle audiences seeing "movies" for the first time. Stephen Bottomore marks their centenary by sifting reality from myth to discuss how "a latter-day miracle" affected its audiences "culture and sensibility."

One hundred years ago much of the world had its first opportunity to see moving pictures. The cinema was an immediate success, and during its rapid development over the next few years was constantly the object of public debate. The coming of any new technology generates comment and often apprehension, but there were certain aspects of the cinema which made it of especial interest.

Firstly, moving pictures were a highly realistic mirror of the world, which people found intriguing and disturbing. Secondly, cinema had the potential to be an art form as well as a technological development, the first new art form that had arisen in historical memory. Finally, it was cheap and popular, appealing to the masses, and, therefore, a likely target for regulation.

The earliest films were not projected on a screen, but were shown in peep-show machines called Kinetoscopes, developed by W.L.K Dickson and Thomas Edison, and marketed from 1894. These were followed three years later by similar peep-show devices called Mutoscopes. The latter were to become known as "What the Butler Saw" machines, based on the risque scenes which they often contained, which soon led to controversy. In 1899 in England, a Member of Parliament wrote to The Times about Mutoscopes. There were, he reported:

"nude female figures represented [and]...as the pictures are all moving, it makes them the more dangerous in their influence".

Two years later another MP, Mr Caine, raised the matter in Parliament and listed some of the titles of these "filthy" mutoscope scenes, including Five girls in one bed, Lady undressing, After the bath and Why Marie put out the light. The latter :

"represented a young woman in a bedroom fully dressed. She removed one article of dress after another to the last garment, and the picture vanished as she prepares to remove that".

From 1895 peep-show moving pictures were superseded by projected films, thus attaining a much larger image size and a greater impact. The screen image provided the closest copy of the real world that had yet been achieved by technology, and this startling authenticity could sometimes cause confusion in early spectators. In 1896 the Strand Magazine wrote of a film, Rough Sea at Rams-gate, that:

"the spray is thrown up in so realistic a fashion as to make the people in the stalls actually start involuntarily, lest they should be drenched!"

Films of approaching vehicles and trains seem to have caused particular disquiet. Le Courrier du Centre in July 1896 wrote of one film that:

"it is so realistic that, at the appearance of the train the spectators draw back instinctively, fearing they'll be run over by the steel monster."

while the New York Telegram in October noted of another train film:

"Suddenly the Empire State Express looms in sight way off in the distance and comes steaming towards you right dead at you at full speed...two ladies who were in the box last night screamed and fainted."

It might be doubted that spectators could have reacted in this apparently infantile manner, yet a number of such accounts appear independently, and it is likely that there was at least some truth in them. But equally, one has the impression of the theme being retold with delight by assorted journalists, cartoonists and others. It has been suggested that this was one way in which people learned to be comfortable with this new medium of cinema, by ridiculing a group - the naive yokels - who clearly were not.

The early cinema also provoked another anxiety. With so many films being made there was surely some risk that a camera might record someone or something that it should not have, and this could then be shown on the screen as entertainment. What is more, nothing could be done about it, at least according to a court in southern France. In early 1905 in Narbonne, a congregation were filmed coming out of a church:

"one of the worshippers later objected to his image being shown on a cinema screen in public, but in the subsequent court case he lost, the judge arguing that the film camera had been set up openly so that any one who wished could avoid being filmed, and that in any case one did not have copyright in one's own features!"

Perhaps a person's every act was now fair game to be turned into public amusement in front of a music-hall public? This possibility exercised certain writers: In 1897 George Sims published a story in The Referee in which a wife is suspected by her husband of infidelity. No evidence can be found for his suspicions until he takes her to a music hall and some films are screened, including one shot in a public park. Sure enough, it shows the wife and her lover:

"In the Cinematographe the woman was looking up into the man's face. Presently they sat down on the seat. His arm stole round her waist - she put up her face - he stooped and kissed her. The audience yelled with laughter. Mr-. uttered an oath of rage that rang through the darkened house..."

In the same year a French writer, Gabriel Aubray, compared the all- seeing eye of the cinema to the deity, "recording what occurs for all time", reminding us that,

"in the game of life nothing is lost, everything counts...and too bad for the players whom the cinematographe has caught in a grotesque or awkward posture".

But discussion of the cinema swiftly went beyond these immediate anxieties about a new technology. Within a remarkably short time production of films became established as an industry, and scores of cameramen were despatched all over the world in order to film diverse activities and places. Early audiences were fascinated to see such realistic records of their world (albeit often lasting less than a minute and in flickering black and white). Perhaps the most popular of these films were taken from moving railway trains which could almost make people feel they were at the very places filmed. In 1902 George Sims noted of the Biograph films at London's Palace Theatre.

"The journey on a railway engine through Swiss valleys or Canadian snows gives one the feeling of travelling. When my friend has travelled by the express train of the Palace Biograph over the Rocky Mountains, and finds himself as the lights go up still sitting in his stall, he jumps up and exclaims, "Do we get out here?"

As the film industry expanded, it seemed that virtually every place and event was being recorded on film. Did one actually need to visit places any longer if they could be seen on the screen? Some suggested that this consideration might help to explain smaller crowds which were turning out for processions and public events. After failing to glimpse the king and queen in London in early 1914, a mother was overheard saying to her child:

"Never mind, my dear, it doesn't matter very much if we can't see the procession now. You must come with me tonight to the cinema, and we will have a comfortable view of everything".

But after the first few years of seeing endless shots of daily life, foreign sights and views from the fronts of trains, the novelty had started to wear thin, and producers came up with something new. Acted films gave the movies a second wind shortly after the turn of the century and were a major reason for their phenomenal growth in popularity, in the form of chase films, slapstick comedies, historical and modern dramas.

It soon became apparent that what interested audiences most in these so-called "photoplays" were the performers. Increasingly, cinemagoers started to recognise individual "picture personalities" who appeared in the one-reel dramas and comedies from companies like Biograph and Pathe, and wanted to know m.ore about them. Yet for several years performers' names were not credited and some film fans clearly felt the lack. In 1909 one New York audience were watching a film in which a certain actress appeared:

"As she draws nearer, and her features are discerned, a boy in the front row piped up excitedly: "Hey, it's Adelaide!" A wave of applause swept the crowded west-side theater. "That's Adelaide Marsh," said the exhibitor. "I had to write to the film company and get her name - they pestered me so. Pretty soon it will be necessary to project upon the screen the cast of characters as well as the name of the play."

But there was initially some resistance in the film industry to publicising the names of these "star" actors, and only after Carl Laemmle's 1910 publicity campaign for his actress, Florence Lawrence, were main performers credited. In the following few years fan magazines were established and post-cards and other memorabilia of players such as Asta Nielsen and Charlie Chaplin were issued. The "star system" had begun.

Largely thanks to the phenomenal popularity of acted films the cinema swiftly became a mass medium and exhibition sites sprang up everywhere. By 1907 there were some 3,000 "Nickelodeon" movie theatres in America, which were basically converted street-front stores. In Britain films were widely shown in music-halls, fairgrounds and elsewhere. A boom in constructing purpose-built cinemas began from about 1909, and the number of cinemas almost quadrupled from about a thousand the following year to 3,800 in 1913. There were cinema building booms in other countries too and the result was a new feature in the main streets of towns and cities all over the world:

Strange structures with names like "Bijou Dream", "Electric Theatre", "Lichtspiele", "Omnia-Pathe", " Biograf" and "Cinematografo". Audiences swelled to fill these new buildings: "in Britain weekly ticket sales rose from four million in 1911 to seven million in 1914 and twenty million in 1916. In the USA admissions grew from twenty-six million a week in 1908 to forty-nine million by the start of the war."

Inside these new cinemas there was often an atmosphere of warm informality. Virginia Woolf visited a London picture palace in January 1915 and, while finding the drama "very boring", noted that the hall was crowded, roars of laughter, applause". Unlike the relative silence of the auditorium in the later Hollywood era, early audiences often took part in the show, applauding or making comments about the action or characters on screen.

Such participation was stimulated by the fact that most films in the early period were short - often less than ten minutes - leading to frequent breaks between reels. Cinema was altogether more of a live event in the early era, with the films usually accompanied by music or sound effects and sometimes a running commentary to help explain the plots.

Early moving picture shows were frequently overcrowded: a 1911 report on such shows in New York found that, of fifty venues visited, thirty- six were crowded to danger point, and:

"The ventilation in most of the places was wretched, no air being admitted except such as came through the front doors. In many places attendants went through the room with an atomizer spraying perfumery on the crowd to allay the odour."

Audiences grew to expect this spraying, and at one British cinema the lady who did it was greeted with calls of "Let us spray!"

But this "live" environment and active, participating audience is not the whole story. It was becoming clear even in this early period that moving pictures had the ability to absorb the inner thoughts of spectators to a greater extent than other forms of entertainment. In 1911 an Italian psychologist, Dr Mario Ponzo, claimed that films had a powerful psychological effect, somehow stimulating all the senses - not just sight with what was depicted on screen. This seductive effect might help to explain why audiences became so emotionally drawn into films. Spectators sometimes identified so strongly with film characters that they became a sort of emotional mirror for what was taking place on screen, as one observer reported in a 1914 article entitled "The moving picture face":

"I happened to take my eyes from the screen and look at the man sitting beside me, when lo! his face was moving in response to every contortion upon the face of the actor. Again, I have noticed some much-affected young women swaying to and fro, obeying every moment [sic] of the sorrowing heroine. One thing surely can be said of the pictures, they absorb the attention of the people who see them even more completely than the speaking dramas of the ordinary theatre."

But this ability of the cinema to entrance was criticised by 'The Nation' in 1910:

"here you are passive and vacant...The electric theatre has made all the poor makeshift of words an obsolete and archaic device. It does your imagining for you. It saves you the labor of conception."

This was just one of many criticisms of the cinema which were appearing by this time, but its chidings were mild indeed compared to the storm of protests arising against the new medium on other grounds. Critics claimed that films damaged the eyesight (the French called this syndrome cinematophtalmie), that they were a fire risk, and that they were destroying the live theatre. Worst of all was the moral danger. It was widely known that many amorous couples found the darkened cinema to be a convenient refuge from the strictures imposed elsewhere: a good place to be alone in a crowd. In D. H. Lawrence's Sons and Lovers (1913), Paul has a passionate affair with a married woman, Clara, and one of their meetings takes place in a cinematograph theatre:

"As they sat, he saw her hand lying near him. For some moments he dared not touch it. The pictures danced and dithered. Then he took her hand in his. It was large and firm; it filled his grasp. He held it fast.:"

This lubricious atmosphere in cinemas was feared by some critics as a moral hazard for women. Various New York film shows were described in 1909 as,

"recruiting stations of vice...more young women and girls are led astray in these places than any other way".

At one time an ordnance was introduced in the city that movie shows must be segregated, while another stated that they must be lit during the performance.

But the main moral threat posed by cinema was that the contents of many films were seen as worthless, immoral or even depraved. This charge was especially frequent in Germany, and a movement arose against the Schund-film ("trashy film"). In 1910 Pastor Walter Conradt randomly selected 250 films and counted ninety-seven murders, fifty-one adulteries, nineteen seductions, forty-five suicides, and 176 robberies. In the light of such protests, some kind of regulation and censorship was inevitable. in France the national government intervened in 1909 to remind local mayors that they could ban films. In Germany a regionally based censorship system developed, with Prussia listing forbidden film titles from 1911, while in Austria a national system to approve films for production began the following year.

By contrast, in Britain and America national systems evolved, but industry-based rather than government run. In America the National Board of Censorship began work in 1909, based at the People's Institute, New York, and its decisions were accepted across the country. In Britain the film industry forestalled government intervention by starting its own censorship system in 1912, the British Board of Film Censors. In their first year of operation the BBFC listed twenty-two grounds on which exception had been taken to films they had viewed including "indecorous dancing", "medical operations", "executions", "native customs in foreign lands abhorrent to British ideas", "cruelty to women" and "vulgarity and impropriety in conduct and dress".

Young people were considered the main group at risk from the immoralities of film shows, partly because they were the most ardent film fans. Reports from towns and regions in various parts of the world tell us that children made up a large, and in some places the major, proportion of the audience. A Calais journalist in 1910 noted that:

"Children are the keenest patrons of the cinema, girls even more than boys. In country areas parents let them go alone".

In British cities such as Bradford and Manchester during the First World War, up to half the school children went to the pictures at least once a week. The most devoted child moviegoers may have been Americans: In 1911 in New York sixty per cent of children went to see films every week and in another US city at the time only one in ten children did not attend moving pictures shows. The Moving Picture World in 1909 noted of these child spectators:

"It is one of our greatest pleasures in life to watch the rapt attention which they give the pictures, to watch their wondering eyes and the expression on their faces which indicates wonderment, interest and attention. It is the same with all degrees and classes of children-the prosperous, the highly educated, the children of the very poor."

They started young, often going in with their mothers, and the peak age for young people to attend moving picture shows was twelve for boys and eleven for girls. These figures come from a 1914 report on film shows in Portland, Oregon, which was also full of unfavourable comments from its respectable investigators about the films being shown predominantly westerns and come-dies - and the damage they would do to the children:

"My impressions of the worthlessness of the films increased as I continued my investigations. The pictures seemed fairly harmless at first. They were not notably bad. There were no flagrant violations of decency. But the accumulation of worthlessness after the fourth program left the impression that they all had a general demoralizing influence."

Of course, the young themselves had few if any of these fears about moving picture shows:

"for them the movies were a wonderful new entertainment, which they attended with almost fanatical devotion. The Bio-scope reported in 1911 that when the parents of an eleven-year-old boy moved to the country from Paris, he ran back to the city no less than six times, "because he could not live without picture theatres."

There was one type of film the young loved above all. A 1914 survey of San Francisco children found that "wild west" films were their favourites by far, and for children up to the seventh grade they were two or three times as popular as any other kind of film. In Europe, only rivalled by comedies, westerns achieved comparable popularity:

"Undoubtedly Western films are the favourites of an audience,"

said the Bioscope in 1910.

A children's game of "Cowboys and Indians" was directly inspired by western films, and soon became a common sight on Britain's streets. But Westerns were also greatly appreciated by older moviegoers, and they proved to be one of America's most saleable genres on the world market. A 1914 report on film shows in Honduras noted that Wild West films were the local people's favourite, and as a result they had

"come to think that the entire population of the United States is made up chiefly of cowboys, Indians and soldiers, who spend their time chasing each other."

As well as in America, in the early days Westerns were also made in Britain and France. But shooting such films on location sometimes led to misunderstandings: In 1906 a man walking in Epping Forest was amazed to see "a weird crowd of Red Indians" making a desperate attack on a shanty:

"...with a lot of gun-firing and war-whoops...The spectator rubbed his eyes in dazed astonishment at this remarkable vision, but he subsequently discovered that it was not a real Indian raid, but only a stage-scene for a bio-graph show."

Such confusion was not infrequent in this period, if one is to believe the numerous anecdotes of this nature. But by about 1913 so many films were being shot in streets and country areas that the public may have become wary of crying wolf. That, at least was the conclusion of several cartoonists, who suggested that criminals might use the excuse of "we're only making a film" to cover their crimes if challenged. Some even surmised that the new phenomenon of location filming was transforming the whole public mood, and making people more blase about seeing bizarre and outlandish events in the streets around them.

If true, this was just part of the powerful influence that the cinema was bringing to bear in this period before the outbreak of the First World War. As a contemporary slogan put it, films had conquered the world. In less than twenty years, this new medium had penetrated every corner of the globe to become part of the daily life of millions of people. In tens of thousands of cinemas every day people were enjoying a form of amusement which could not have been imagined a generation before, but which some now found almost indispensable: What was the attraction? Perhaps journalist Mary Heaton Vorse put it most eloquently in The Outlook in June 1911. The moving picture, she wrote, "was a latter-day miracle" for the immigrant audiences of New York:

"It is the door of escape, for a few cents, from the realities of life. It is drama, and it is travel, and it is even beauty, all in one. A wonderful thing it is, and to know just how wonderful I suppose you must be poor and have in your life no books and no pictures and no means of travel or seeing beautiful places, and almost no amusements of any kind...It is no wonder that it is a great business with a capitalization of millions of dollars, since it gives to the people who need it most laughter and drama and beauty and a chance for once to look at the strange places of the earth."


Further Reading:

Stephen Bottomore, I Want to See this Annie Mattygraph : A Cartoon History of the Coming of the Movies (Pordenone/British Film Institute, 1996)

Nicholas Hiley, The British Cinema Auditorium in K. Dibbets, B. Hogenkamp, Film and the First World War (Amsterdam University Press, 1995)

Charles Musser, The Emergence of Cinema: the American Screen to 1907 (Scribner, 1990)

Yuri Tsivian, Early Cinema in Russia and Its Cultural Reception (Routledge, 1994)

R. Brown, B. Anthony, The History of the British Mutoscope and Biograph Company (Flicks Books, 1996)

L. McKernan, S. Herbert, Who's Who in Victorian Cinema (BFI, 1996)

Ian Christie, The Last Machine: Early Cinema and the Birth of the Modern World (BFI, 1994)


Source: Bottomore, Stephen, The coming of the cinema.., Vol. 46, History Today, 03-01-1996, pp 14. Copyright 1996 by History Today Ltd.

Stephen Bottomore is a television director and independent film historian based in London. He is researching the early cinema and its social context.

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