Penny pleasures: Film exhibition in London during the nickelodeon era, 1906-1914

Film History: An International Journal

Volumn 16, Issue 1, 2004, Pages 60-91

  Burrows, Jon ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF WARWICK   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 38849172624     PISSN: 08922160     EISSN: 15533905     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.2979/FIL.2004.16.1.60     Document Type: Article

References (65)

1. 'First Kinematograph Theatre in London', Kinematograph and Lantern Weekly (henceforth K.L.W.), 25 July 1907, 166
2. 'Wake Up, John Bull!', K.L.W., 29 August 1907, 245
3. Richard Gray, Cinemas in Britain: One Hundred Years of Cinema Architecture (London: Lund Humphries, 1996), 16
4. Charles Musser, The Emergence of Cinema: The American Screen to 1907 (NewYork: Scribner, 1990
5. repr. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1994), 417-428
6. Gregory A. Waller, Main Street Amusements: Movies and Commercial Entertainment in a Southern City, 1896-1930 (Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1995), 66-69
7. Eileen Bowser, The Transformation of Cinema: 1907-1915 (New York: Scribner, 1990; repr. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1994), 10-11
8. The high intellectual stakes involved are very neatly demonstrated by the intense debate - ostensibly about the seemingly prosaic issue of the numbers and locations of Manhattan nickelodeons - which raged on for several years in the pages of one of the leading US film studies journals; it was sparked off by Ben Singer's 'Manhattan Nickelodeons: New Data on Audiences and Exhibitors', Cinema Journal 34:3 (Spring 1995): 5-35
9. and followed up in Sumiko Higashi, 'Dialogue: Manhattan's Nickelodeons', Cinema Journal, 35:3 (Spring 1996): 72-74
10. Robert C. Allen, 'Manhattan Myopia; or, Oh! Iowa!', ibid.: 75-103
11. William Uricchio and Roberta Pearson, 'New York? New York!', Cinema Journal, 36:4 (Summer 1997): 98-102
12. Ben Singer, 'Manhattan Melodrama', ibid.: 107-112
13. Miriam Hansen, Babel and Babylon: Spectatorship in American Silent Film (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991), 61, 94
14. Rachael Low, The History of the British Film 1906-1914 (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1948), 14
15. Leslie Wood, The Romance of the Movies: A Thoroughly Well Documented and Illustrated Account of the Past, Present and Future of the Film (London: William Heinemann, 1937), 70-77, 283
16. See, for example, John Barnes, The Beginnings of the Cinema in England 1894-1901: Volume 3 1898 (London: Bishopsgate Press, 1988; repr. Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 1996), 74
17. Nicholas Hiley, '"Nothing More Than a 'Craze'": Cinema Building in Britain from 1909 to 1914', in Andrew Higson (ed.), Young and Innocent? The Cinema in Britain 1896-1930 (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2002): 111-127. Since the conclusions which I draw in this article are in some ways the opposite of those advanced by Hiley, I think it is important to make two brief points here about his extremely impressive research. Hiley's work demonstrates, in a way no other international research on early film exhibition has managed, how important it is to appreciate and understand the role played by speculative business enterprise in the expansion of the public amusement sector, and just how removed its motivating logic and sphere of operations can be from the realm of showmen and audiences, which film scholars traditionally isolate as the most important determining agents. Having said this, however, I find a major problem with the terminology Hiley employs in this essay, which is implicit in its title. He indiscriminately labels any kind of venue which is exclusively dedicated to the exhibition of films - as distinct from, say, music halls or religious meeting places which peripatetically give film shows - as a 'purpose-built cinema', compiling various tables of statistics on the same principle which purport to show the scale of cinema 'construction' in Britain. This creates the misleading impression that all dedicated film shows were new property developments and therefore reliant upon large sources of capital. Not only is this not true, it elides all meaningful and significant distinctions between different kinds of cinemas - of which, as I aim to show, there were a great many
18. Roberta Pearson, 'Transitional Cinema', in Geoffrey Nowell-Smith (ed.), The Oxford History of World Cinema (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 38
19. 'Exhibitors' Difficulties', K.L.W.,3 October 1907, 353
20. and Julie Ann Lindstrom, '"Getting a hold deeper in the life of the city": Chicago Nickelodeons, 1905-1914', (PhD dissertation; Northwestern University, 1998), 82
21. See, for example, William Uricchio and Roberta E. Pearson, Reframing Culture: The Case of the Vitagraph Quality Films (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993), 24-40
22. J.A. Lindstrom, '"Almost Worse Than the Restrictive Measures": Chicago Reformers and the Nickelodeons', Cinema Journal, 39:1 (Fall 1999): 91
23. Daniel T. Rodgers, Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age (Cambridge, MA: Belknap/Har-vard University Press, 1998), 52-75
24. For a general overview of how Progressive ideas informed the LCC's early activities see Susan D. Pennybacker, A Vision For London 1889-1914: Labour. Everyday Life and the LCC Experiment (London: Routledge, 1995), passim
25. Parkland statistics and the accusations of municipal Puritanism are taken from Chris Waters, 'Progressives, Puritans and the Cultural Politics of the Council, 1889-1914', in Andrew Saint (ed.), Politics and the People of London: The London County Council 1889-1965 (London: Hambledon, 1989), 56, 62-63
26. Pennybacker, A Vision for London, 217
27. See, for example, Susan Pennybacker, '"It was not what she said but the way that she said it": The London County Council and the Music Halls', in Peter Bailey (ed.), Music Hall: The Business of Pleasure (Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1986), 118-140
28. Lindstrom, '"Getting a hold ..."', 29-31
29. Raymond B. Fosdick, 'Report on Motion Picture Theatres of Greater New York, 22 March 1911', posted at http://cinemaweb.com/silentfiIm/book-shelf/17- fi-3.htm, accessed on 7 September 2003
30. William Uricchio and Roberta E. Pearson, 'Corruption, Criminality and the Nickelodeon', in John Fullerton (ed.), Celebrating 1895: The Centenary of Cinema (Sydney: John Libbey, 1998), 82-95
31. 'LCC Regulations', K.L.Y.J., 2 January 1908,131
32. Penelope Summerfield, 'The Effingham Arms and the Empire: Deliberate Selection in the Evolution of Music Hall in London', in Eileen and Stephen Yeo (eds), Popular Culture and Class Conflict, 1590-1914 (Brighton: Harvester, 1981), 217
33. Rick Altman, 'The Silence of the Silents', Musical Quarterly, 80:4 (Winter 1996): 663
34. Richard Abel, 'That Most American of Attractions, The Illustrated Song', in Abel and Rick Altman (eds), The Sounds of Early Cinema (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2001), 143-155
35. Judith Thissen, 'Jewish Immigrant Audiences in New York City, 1905-14', in Melvyn Stokes and Richard Maltby (eds), American Movie Audiences: From the Turn of the Century to the Early Sound Period (London: BFI, 1999), 19
36. Robert C. Allen, 'Motion Picture Exhibition in Manhattan, 1906-1912: Beyond the Nickelodeon', Cinema Journal, 17:2 (Spring 1979)
37. reprinted in John L Fell (ed.), Film Before Griffith (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1983), 171-172
38. Altman, 'The Silence of the Silents', 690
39. See, respectively, Optical Lantern and Cinematograph Journal, April 1905, 142
40. K.L.W., 20 June 1907, 83
41. The Bioscope, 6 June 1909, 21; 30 September 1909, 51
42. 'Prosecution at West Ham', The Bioscope, 1 July 1909,9
43. 'Kinematograph Shows: Do They Require Licences?', K.L.W., 25 February 1909, 1145
44. on the same kind of point see also 'The Triumph of the Cinematograph', Daily Mail, 5 January 1909, 4
45. Peter R. Shergold, Working-Class Life: The "American Standard" in Comparative Perspective 1899-1913 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1982), 51, 64,75, 110,140-141, 155,171, 174,209,212,224
46. Michael G. Aronson, The Wrong Kind of Nickel Madness: Pricing Problems for Pittsburgh Nickelodeons', Cinema Journal, 42:1 (Fall 2002): 85
47. See John Springhall, 'Leisure and Victorian Youth: The Penny Theatre in London, 1830-1890', in John Hurt (ed.), Childhood, Youth and Education in the Late Nineteenth Century (Leicester: History of Education Society, 1981), 101-124
48. 'Exhibitors' Difficulties', KLW., 3 October 1907, 353
49. Springhall, 'Leisure and Victorian Youth', 118-119
50. By-line in The Bioscope, 12 August 1909, 4
51. See Bowser, The Transformation of Cinema, 133-134
52. Aronson, 'The Wrong Kind of Nickel Madness', 79-80
53. The Bioscopee, 3 June 1909, 29
54. Rinking World and Picture Theatre News, 30 April 1910, 20. Partisan updates on this struggle for ascendancy appeared in subsequent issues
55. 'Schemes, Scares and Scandal', The Bioscope, 30 October 1908, 3
56. K.L.W., 24 December 1908, 82; 29 July 1909, 142
57. see also 'Starting a Kinematograph Exhibition', K.L.W., 25 November 1909, 127
58. 'Uniforms As Indicators', The Bioscope, 27 January 1910, 25
59. A.C. Bromhead, 'Scrapbook for 1904', BBC Written Archives Centre, Caversham - reference kindly supplied by Stephen Bottomore
60. 'Unfortunate Accident at a Picture Show', K.L.W., 31 December 1908, 883
61. Low, The History of the British Film 1906-1914, 18
62. Colin Harding, Simon Popple (eds), In the Kingdom of Shadows: A Companion to Early Cinema (London: Cygnus Arts, 1996), 208
63. Gray, Cinemas in Britain, 23
64. 'Regulations Close a Picture Theatre', TheBioscope, 6 January 1910, 57
65. Pennybacker, '"It was not what she said ..."', 122