Empire of Things

by Frank Trentmann

  Interpretations like this have had considerable influence, and it is easy to understand why. We know what followed: the totalitarian use of film and entertainment, and the ubiquity of standardized Hollywood fare. The benefit of hindsight, however, can blind us to what there was before. References to ‘mass society’ are essentially ahistorical. They suggest a universal, passive consumer across time, as if movie-going was always the same. When Kracauer deplored the ‘cult of distraction’, the cinema was already celebrating its thirty-second birthday. And its childhood was quite different from its middle age.

  The first kinetoscope opened on Broadway in New York in 1894 in a converted shoe store. It showed pictures through a peep-hole. In the early years, moving pictures were part of an existing ensemble of entertainment, rather than a separate activity. They were shown in music halls and swimming baths, at fairs and in mission halls. Travelling cinemas passed through small towns and rural areas and were crucial in spreading a taste for the new medium. In the Netherlands, for example, they reached 1 million viewers. Utrecht’s Tivoli Park had a tent especially reserved for travelling shows. A typical local Varieté cinema in 1904 showed moving pictures to around 70,000 viewers a week. Some travelling cinemas were palaces on wheels, with mirrors 13 metres tall, gilded decorations, an organ, hundreds of light bulbs and silk-covered seats in the front row. They comfortably seated seven hundred people. A typical format was that of Guido Seeber’s Wanderkino in 1904. Starting with a musical concert, this travelling cinema then showed the audience a short film of the Gordon Bennett Cup – the first international motor race in 1903 – before taking them on a walk through London’s zoological garden and to a bullfight in Madrid in front of the Spanish king. The show ended with Sleeping Beauty and a tour of the ‘fascinating lumber trade to Canada’ – all for 40 pfennigs.117

  It was in 1906 that cinemas began to settle down. In the United States and Western Europe, most cities, large and small, now got a fixed movie house. London’s first was the Balham Empire, with seating for one thousand. In the States, Lexington, Kentucky, had two cinemas for its 25,000 inhabitants. The growth in the following years was phenomenal. By 1914, Britain had 3,800 cinemas. London alone had almost five hundred, with seating for 400,000, more than five times that in music halls. Within a decade, cinema had become the dominant form of popular entertainment. In 1913, 250,000 Londoners went to the cinema, every day. In New York City, the weekly attendance was closer to a million; almost a third were children. Fun had never been cheaper. Almost everyone had a nickel for the nickelodeon. In Britain, children often got two pennies pocket money – one for the ticket, the other for sweets to go with it.118

  Far from being a sudden shock to the raw nerves of innocent viewers, early cinema worked in tandem with a range of established technologies of marvel. In its travelling days, it built on the customary culture of fairs. In music halls, short pictures were interspersed with song and humour. There is little evidence that the first generation of viewers found cinema unnerving. The magic lantern and the panorama had prepared audiences from all classes for the sensation of moving images and illusions of reality, in rural Ireland as well as the centre of Paris. Panoramas went back to the 1790s and immersed spectators in landscapes and battle scenes painted on vast canvases that often stretched to over 200 square metres. The next generation added the diorama, which moved the scenes themselves in front of an audience. By 1889, there were seventeen of these in Paris. The La Tourraine diorama offered a life-sized model of a steamer. Sitting inside it, workers and peasants who had never seen the Atlantic experienced a sea passage along the French coastline, with moving canvases of waves, beaches and hotels. Over a million visitors went. Another simulated voyage took Parisians from Venice to Constantinople, in under half an hour, including the smell of sea water and the motion of the sea. Even once they were permanent, cinemas did not necessarily operate as separate entertainment. The Hippodrome in Paris, ‘the biggest cinema in the world’, opened on 14 December 1907 and aimed at total spectacle. It was a circular hall with an open area in the centre for horses and, later, elephants. A full-size orchestra played. On opening night, the audience was treated to eighteen short films, choral singing and a boxing match.119

  Audiences were everything but passive spectators in a trance. They cheered on heroes and booed villains. For producers, the volume of applause was an indication of a star’s worth. Sometimes the audience was the main entertainment. Showings were frequently disrupted. One Londoner recalled his childhood visit around 1910 to a local cinema that sat thirty, with kids at the front. Every time the short film broke down again, ‘a stout lady who always sat on a cushioned stool near the Exit . . . tugged at a little chain hanging from the gas-lamp near the door.’ The room flooded with light: ‘the management had learned not to leave a company of children in the dark with nothing to engage their attention.’ At a ‘more stately pleasure-dome’, brown-uniformed attendants ‘paraded the aisles from time to time squirting deodorant over our heads’.120 Cinemas had narrators and musicians who built up scenes in their own, individual style. Many ran a continuous programme, from morning to midnight. People came and went as they pleased. A structured viewing format, where audiences arrived during the trailer and left after ‘the end’, only slowly emerged in the 1930s.

  Until 1909, film length had an upper limit of 300 metres, or sixteen minutes. In the next few years, Quo Vadis and Les Miserables were the first to offer two continuous hours. The initial response, however, was one of scepticism, and gives us a sense of dominant viewing habits. The editor of the French Ciné-Journal observed in October 1911:

  the public enters and leaves in the middle of the show . . . Our spectators tend to be people who go the cinema for an hour to experience diverse emotions and have their curiosity satisfied quickly. They love short drama and pretty comedies. They appreciate the news of the week and films about distant lands, exotic tribes and natural history. How can we possibly open our programmes with a long film that is the entire programme?121

  The succession of genres shown across a programme required audiences to switch between modes and speeds of viewing. This was not conducive to mass hypnosis.

  For Simmel, the mind had two layers. Deeply felt and emotional relationships were located in the ‘more unconscious layers of the psyche and grow most readily in the steady rhythm of uninterrupted habituations’, associated with rural life. The intellect occupied the ‘transparent, conscious, higher layers of the psyche’.122 Metropolitan life, he believed, simultaneously drained the lower layers and exhausted the higher ones. What he failed to appreciate was that movies also cultivated new faculties. Local films, shot at the factory gate, gave workers a chance to watch themselves on screen. Audiences shouted in delight at recognizing themselves and friends. Nature and travel films created a sense of moving through time and space. ‘I love the cinematograph,’ one Frenchman confessed in 1907. ‘It satisfies my curiosity . . . I tour the world and stop where it pleases me, in Tokyo and Singapore. I follow the craziest itineraries’, from the Rocky Mountains to the waterfalls of the Zambezi.123

  By 1914, most people in American and Western European cities went to the movies routinely, but this did not automatically make them a homogeneous public. Taste and habits reflected class, education, gender and ethnicity. For working-class wives the cinema was a liberator. Instead of spending Saturday alone at home, they, like their husbands, now went out to entertain themselves. Girls tended to go to the movies less often than boys, who enjoyed greater control over their time and money. Migrant communities had their own theatres. The Jewish cinema in New York’s Lower East Side mixed Yiddish vaudeville with biblical films. For Italian migrants, Italian imports were as important as movies about the American way of life. Arguably, it was films such as Dante’s Inferno (1911) that turned Sicilians into Italians in the first place. In Chicago, African-Americans went to the black movie theatre on the South Side. For affluent shoppers, there were cinemas alongside department stores with spe
cial afternoon showtimes. By 1910, cinema attracted audiences from all classes and in all kinds of cities.124

  The most nuanced picture of audiences we have is for Germany, where in 1913 the student Emilie Altenloh observed movie-goers in Mannheim for her doctoral thesis on the ‘sociology of cinema’, the first academic study of its kind. Mannheim was a city with 200,000 inhabitants and a dozen cinemas. Cinemas were stratified. Workers paid 50 pfennigs but the local elite paid ten times that for a box seat and arrived in evening dress. In between these two groups sat officers, engineers and traders. It was academics who went to the movies least often – a point worth remembering, given the often patronizing accounts of early movies and movie-goers by Kracauer and other intellectuals. Tastes diverged considerably, including among the lower classes. Industrial workers, Altenloh found, liked humour and love stories best. The petit-bourgeoisie enjoyed historical drama and war. Artisans, on the other hand, preferred nature and educational films. For them, entertainment had to have a practical value. It is impossible to disentangle entirely the social bias from these findings. Altenloh was convinced that the proletariat was culturally impoverished, with a passion for Indians and robbers but immune to anything requiring deep appreciation. Still, her interviews do bring out the range of cultural practices missing from accounts of homogeneous mass consumption. ‘I visit almost everything,’ a fifteen-year-old machine fitter reported. ‘Mondays I go to the cinema. Tuesdays I stay at home. On Wednesdays I go to the theatre. Fridays I have gymnastics’ and ‘Sundays I go for a walk in the woods with the girl from next door.’125 He does not tell us what happened next, but he did list his preferred genres. He especially liked romantic love stories and films about Indians and aviators. But he also adored Wagner and Schiller. This skilled worker suggests that tastes might have been more complex a century ago than has been assumed. Cowboys and Fantomas, the arch-criminal genius of evil, did not push Lohengrin off the stage.

  Warnings of cinematic overstimulation were part of more general anxieties about leisure. Attempts to regulate recreation and drive out plebeian entertainment from public space went back to the seventeenth century and before. Industrialization gave them fresh urgency. Industry required discipline, and less drink and leisure at the workplace. Once separated from work, leisure turned into a social problem that called for further discipline. What if people wasted their spare time on immoral and stupefying distractions instead of improving themselves? Victorians launched a crusade for ‘rational recreation’.126 Cities, churches and companies established libraries, working men’s clubs, YMCAs and athletic teams. This unease expressed a deeper ambivalence about consumer choice: could individuals be trusted to choose their own recreation? The simultaneous shortening of the work day and rise in spending power set off a frightening growth in commercial temptations. In the 1850s, industrial workers in the United States worked almost seventy hours a week. By 1890, this had dropped to sixty hours; by 1918, it was fifty-four. The whole balance of national life seemed to be shifting. The ‘land of labour’, was turning into a ‘nation of idlers’, the president of Colgate University in upstate New York warned. America was heading the way of ancient Rome, amusing itself to death. Commercial leisure was so dangerous because it gave free rein to instinctive impulses, previously sublimated by hard labour. It was ‘cheap, enervating and deteriorating’ and resulted in ‘moral and intellectual degeneration’.127 Across the Atlantic, there was similar unease about the corrupting force of cinemas, gambling and dance halls. A militaristic climate heightened fears that the national body was softening.

  The growing visibility of children and adolescents as consumers gave these anxieties a new generational complexion. Friedrich Nietzsche and youth leaders called on the young to shed the ‘pseudo-wants’ of city life. Significantly, it was at this time, in 1904, that the American psychologist Stanley Hall defined adolescence as a separate life-stage, a period of ‘storm and stress’ prone to perversion and vice.128 Troublesome youths were nothing new in history, but it was now that they were diagnosed as a distinct problem: juvenile delinquents. Moral panic was fuelled by an awareness of the growing independence of youth, in terms of both money and mobility. Scavenging for tin cans, bottles, paper and discarded furniture and selling the loot to the local junkman gave city kids new freedom as consumers. Rising wages freed adolescent workers from parental control. A welfare officer in Germany commented on the mixed blessing of the eight-hour day introduced just after the First World War. Youths now had so much money and time on their hands that they rushed to any kind of entertainment to relieve their boredom. They were ‘tempted into a life-style change that severely damaged their still developing bodies’.129

  The street and the dance hall were flashpoints in the war over leisure. American reformers like Jane Addams felt they were waging an uphill battle. The cinema and corner candy store were much more attractive than the school settlement house. In New York City 95 per cent of children played in the street. A 1909 survey of the Lower East Side – an area of barely one third of a square mile between East Houston, Grand and Suffolk Streets – counted 188 candy shops and stands, 73 soda shops, 9 dance halls and 8 movie houses. There were nine synagogues and churches, one police station and not a single playground. If the saloon was the ‘poor man’s club . . . the candy shop and ice cream parlor are the youngster’s club.’ Here they socialized and skylarked. Candy stores had slot machines and lotteries. Juvenile Protective Agencies warned that sweets and gambling tempted children to steal and pawn their school books. The street was a magnet for delinquency; it was not until the 1920s that cars took over and paper boys disappeared from city centres. Part of the blame fell on overcrowding. Home was no longer ‘sweet home’ but a mere ‘sleeping box and eating den’, in the words of the secretary of New York City’s child welfare committee.130 Adolescents looked for fun in the street.

  Delinquency, however, was not the monopoly of the poor. Recreation was so contested precisely because adolescents from comfortable families also ended up in court. A survey in Cleveland traced delinquency to upwardly mobile families. ‘Their recent prosperity has permitted their children a sudden accession of comfort and money and spare time.’ Such youths had thrown off a ‘patriarchal notion of family control’. ‘The only standard they seem to have substituted is that of cutting a dashing figure with “the crowd”. They . . . represent a nascent social energy permitted to run wild.’ The most frequent offence was staying out at night. Street gangs formed. Girls were going out unsupervised. Girls from families with a decent income were found to spend between two and five hours a day at home on chores, but four and a half hours or more on each school day on street corners and in movies, seven hours on the weekends, ‘often meeting boys’. Girls in seventh grade went skating with boys and had sex. Some ended up in institutions. It was a ‘good’ neighbourhood, the report stressed, that displayed ‘one of the worst failures in developing wholesome uses of spare time’.131

  The dance craze spawned fresh dangers. In the early years of the twentieth century, dancing grew into one of the most popular spare-time activities, second only to reading. Dance halls and academies mushroomed, and introduced girls between the ages of sixteen and twenty-one to slightly older boys. One dollar bought six group lessons. By 1919, Cleveland, for example, a city with 800,000 inhabitants, was home to 115 dance halls. The two at Luna Park and Euclid Beach Park, on the shore of Lake Erie, sold over 120,000 tickets a week. A well-managed academy had rules against ‘tough dancing’, which included ‘hugging, twisting, “spieling” ’.132 At Euclid Beach Park, the dance floor was managed with ‘rigid standards of propriety’. Only the schottische, waltz and two-step were allowed. Couples who thought they could put in an extra glide had to leave the floor. The problem was the many halls where booze and bodies moved freely. In Manhattan, half the dance halls sold liquor. Many dance academies rented out their halls for ‘run off’ affairs. ‘Peculiarly undesirable’ were those that invited ‘the mixture of the hardened girl and the
corrupted man with the unsophisticated who come into such contacts for the first time’. ‘Pick-up acquaintances’ were spreading. To keep ‘this undesirable practice at a minimum’, Cleveland’s recreation experts pressed for more dance-hall inspectors and for ‘alert and wise chaperones’ to police not only the floor but ‘even the sidewalks and streets near the building’.133

  Attempts to clean up youth leisure took two main directions. One was a flight from the city. Boy scouts, Wandervögel and organized youth movements took to the woods and mountains to cleanse and recharge their bodies. If there was to be dancing, it would be folk dancing, or in a loin cloth around a tree. The other approach was to raise the quality of leisure within the city. Youth protection agencies waged a battle against dirt and trash. In Hamburg, teachers and pastors distributed white lists of respectable literature and organized boycotts of bookshops that corrupted the young with stories of crime and Buffalo Bill. On Sunday afternoons, youth centres screened approved films, read fairy tales and held Punch and Judy shows.134 These never reached more than a small minority of the population.

  More significant were the new leisure spaces sponsored by city authorities. European cities had started to open botanical gardens to the public in the middle of the nineteenth century, not without resistance from some middle-class burghers. American cities took this initiative to a new level. City people needed play not Puritanism, reformers argued. This was partly a defensive move, prompted by fears of militant workers. Urban, industrial life was stressful: far better to give workers some entertainment than for their frustration to breed revolution. Strikes taught early critics to accept the movie house as a safe outlet.