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THE REVIEW OF COMMUNICATION
1 (2001): 204-208
© 2001 National Communication Association

Toward a Better Understanding of Early Movie Audiences

Christofer Meissner

Melvyn Stokes and Richard Maltby, editors.  American Movie Audiences: From the Turn of the Century to the Early Sound Era.  London: British Film Institute, 1999.  vi + 179 pages.  Notes and index. $60.00 (cloth); $24.95 (paper).

American Movie Audiences: From the Turn of the Century to the Early Sound Era represents some of the latest work in the burgeoning film studies specialty pertaining to the historical reception of films.  Consisting of ten concise and cogent essays (the entire book runs but 175 pages), plus an introductory chapter by editor Melvyn Stokes, American Movie Audiences is a collection of considerable importance to a number of individual historical questions, as well as to the further understanding of the nature of film audiences in the first four decades of American cinema.

Stokes sets the tone in an introduction entitled “Reconstructing American Cinema’s Audiences.”  He establishes here the anthology’s two key themes (or questions): Who went to films during these early years? What social and cultural functions did movie-going perform? Emphasized is the relative lack of understanding that exists regarding these questions, and highlighted is the evidentiary difficulty of trying to answer historical questions regarding the elusive activity of the movie-going habits of vast numbers of individual spectators.  Other themes are also introduced, such as the lack of audience standardization that pertained in many ways through these years (in terms of such characteristics as class and ethnic composition or viewing experiences).  A bulky portion of Stokes’ essay treats one of the most prominent scholarly disputes about early audiences, that involving Richard C. Allen, Ben Singer, Robert Sklar, and Russell Merritt on the subject of the composition of New York City nickelodeon audiences in the 1900s and early-1910s (what he calls the “Singer-Allen controversy”) (5).

The authors of the ten primary essays in the book read like a who’s-who of recent research in film audiences and film exhibition history.  Judith Thissen contributes an essay called “Jewish Immigrant Audiences in New York City, 1905-14.”  Giorgio Bertellini’s essay is entitled “Italian Imageries, Historical Feature Films and the Fabrication of Italy’s Spectators in Early 1900s New York.”  Alison Griffiths and James Latham write about “Film and Ethnic Identity in Harlem, 1896-1913.”  “‘The Formative and Impressionable Stage’: Discursive Constructions of the Nickelodeon’s Child Audience” is the title of an essay by Roberta Pearson and William Uricchio, authors of the book Reframing Culture: The Case of the Vitagraph Quality Films. These four essays constitute the first of three major sections in American Movie Audiences, called “The Social Formulation of the Audience.”  Part 2, “The Politics of Audiences,” leads off with an essay by Lee Grieveson entitled, “Why the Audience Mattered in Chicago in 1907.”  This is followed by essays by Steven J. Ross, author of Working-Class Hollywood: Silent Film and the Shaping of Class in America (“The Revolt of the Audience: Reconsidering Audiences and Reception During the Silent Era”); Kathryn Helgeson Fuller, author of At the Picture Show: Small Town Audiences and the Creation of Movie Fan Culture (“Viewing the Viewers: Representations of the Audience in Early Cinema Advertising”); and Leslie Midkiff DeBauche (“Reminiscences of the Past, Conditions of the Present: At the Movies in Milwaukee in 1918”).  The third of the book’s sections, labeled “Audiences and the Coming of Sound,” contains two essays: “This is Where We Came In: The Audible Screen and the Voluble Audience of Early Sound Cinema,” by Thomas Doherty, author of Pre-Code Hollywood: Sex, Immorality, and Insurrection in American Cinema, 1930-1934; and “Hillbilly Music and Will Rogers: Small-town Picture Shows in the 1930s,” by Gregory A. Waller, author of Main Street Amusements: Movies and Commercial Entertainment in a Southern City, 1896-1930.

Without exception, the essays are compelling and incisive in regards to their individual historical questions.  Thissen’s and Bertellini’s essays, on Jewish and Italian American audiences, when taken together go a long way towards disproving (or at least problematizing) the common wisdom that early immigrant audiences of the nickelodeon era were indiscriminately “Americanized” by attending the movies.  Thissen analyzes Jewish movie-going in New York City in the context of its co-existence with other Yiddish stage entertainments of the period (such as the Yiddish music hall), with the conclusion that movie-going and these other, more ethnic amusements competed vigorously for attendance among Jewish spectators right up until the mid-1910s.  Bertellini argues that rather than acting as an Americanizing influence for Italian immigrants to Manhattan, the movie-going experience (or key aspects of it) actually reinforced these spectators’ identification with their mother country (which because of the distinctly regional nature of Italian culture and the relatively recent--in 1900--unification of Italy was not as strong as for immigrants from other nations).  Griffiths and Latham treat in conjunction the development of African-American amusements, including cinema, and the establishment of Harlem as New York City’s key black cultural center in the first decade-and-a-half of the twentieth century, making the contention that the two are basically inseparable from one another.  Pearson and Uricchio examine discourse surrounding nickelodeon attendance from the perspective of children, treating how that discourse helped to construct children as a distinct cultural grouping, and how the immigrant audience was constructed through the use of tropes and terminology similar to that used in describing children.

While each of these essays in the first section of the book (“The Social Formulation of the Audience”) treats a distinct subset of audiences in general, the essays in the next section (“The Politics of Audiences”) for the most part discuss more general characteristics of early movie-going.  Ross’ essay (“The Revolt of the Audience”) comes closest to treating a particular audience constituency, as he looks at how some sectors of the early working-class audience became active in attempting to increase (in quantity and quality) the portrayals of working-class subjects in early cinema.  A key argument for Ross is the idea that audiences have (almost) always had very limited power in that they have been able to choose only among the movies that have been made available to them.  Grieveson returns to the idea of the Americanizing influence of early movie-going, but here in the shape of the attempts by reform groups in Chicago (police, civic bodies) to wield power over that process in regards to immigrant audiences.  Part of the success in consolidating that influence, Grieveson argues, lay in the shift from policing the physical site of exhibition (and concerns such as theatre safety) to policing film content (with more attention paid to what was seen onscreen)—a shift marked most dramatically by the establishment of Chicago’s board of censorship in 1907.

Fuller’s and DeBauche’s essays are, perhaps, a little less explicitly politically oriented than Ross’ and Grieveson’s.  Fuller in her essay (“Viewing the Viewers”) does what amounts to a formal analysis of early cinema advertising, specifically pertaining to images of audiences themselves as utilized in promotional material by itinerant exhibitors between the late 1890s and 1910.  What she finds is that itinerant exhibitors who specialized in small-town exhibition (and in particular the outfit operated by Bert Cook in upstate New York) used such images for a longer period than, and used them in ways different from, larger itinerant exhibition companies (in particular that of Lyman Howe). DeBauche’s essay on World War I-era exhibition in Milwaukee, besides serving as a concise “snapshot” of exhibition and reception in a particular American city in a precisely-defined timeframe (April 1918), highlights the indispensability of “the social, political, economic—in short, the historical—context for movie-going” (129).  In particular, DeBauche emphasizes the cultural shifts that took place in this highly German American city in the midst of World War I and how they shaped audience reception of movies.

The final two essays in American Movie Audiences are the only two that deal with the early sound period, and they are probably the two most valuable contributions coming out of the book.  Doherty writes about two intertwined characteristics of early sound film audiences: their tendency to be vocal in response to unfolding action on screen (thus his subtitle, “The Audible Screen and the Voluble Audience of Early Sound Cinema”), and their tendency to enter the theatre without regard for the starting times of pictures (thus his main title, “This is Where We Came In”).  This second phenomenon—of studio-era spectators entering theatres without regard to the observance of narrative conventions such as beginnings, middles, and ends, and then leaving once the program had played through to the point at which they began viewing—is a highly underconsidered circumstance of historical film spectatorship, and Doherty is one of the only scholars to have given it serious attention.  Besides examining these two fascinating characteristics of early sound movie audiences, Doherty also provides thorough analysis of the composition of movie programs in this era, treating newsreels, short subjects, and trailers, and their places in the exhibition schedules of the early sound era.  Waller’s essay (“Hillbilly Music and Will Rogers”) is the book’s sole essay to examine small-town exhibition specifically and exclusively, as he analyzes the connections between small-town movie theatres, radio broadcasting, and the regionalism of country music in Kentucky.

Taken together, the ten essays in American Movie Audiences are a significant and important advance in scholarship relating to movie audiences and the history of film reception.  For a number of the contributors, their essays add to and embellish already substantive bodies of work.  For those seeking lucid historical analyses into specific historical problems relating to film exhibition and audiences between 1895 and 1935, the book delivers admirably.  For the study of film history, American Movie Audiences represents the best work in a rapidly developing specialty.