“At the Picture Palace”: The British Cinema Audience, 1895-1920

Abstract

Despite the assumptions of most film historians, the medium of film does not depend upon a mass audience.Research into the pre-history of moving pictures has clearly demonstrated that much of the technical impetus behind the development of film came not from entertainers, but from scientists eager to record and analyze natural motion.Even without the intervention of showmen or lantern lecturers it is evident that both film cameras and peepshow viewers would have appeared around 1895, as tools by which scientists could record and reconstitute movement in the laboratory.It is also apparent that in time these scientific devices would have been adopted by doctors wishing to demonstrate surgical techniques, by anthropologists trying to record vanishing cultures, and by salesmen needing to demonstrate heavy machinery, all without the intervention of the music hall or shop show.Eventually there would have been both projected moving pictures and even film historians, all without the appearance of either a mass audience or of purpose-built cinemas.This alternative history of the medium is not entirely fanciful.If celluloid film base had been only a fraction more expensive to produce, or just a little more fragile, it would have rendered it impossible for traveling showmen and entertainers to adopt the new moving pictures.The film camera would have remained a scientific instrument, and there would have been no impulse to develop dramatic narrative or to appeal to a mass audience.There would have been film, but not film history as we understand it, for the study of genres and styles, of actors, directors, and studios, of cinemas and fan magazines, would have had no meaning.The more we contemplate this alternative history of film the more it becomes obvious that what we call film history is nothing of the sort.It is not the history of the medium of film, but rather the story of how that medium was adapted to the needs of a paying audience.This simple observation creates considerable problems.Following the 1978 FIAF conference in Brighton, the trend of research into early film has been archive-based, and principally concerned with tracing the developing art of film through the surviving prints and negatives.1 The basis of this history is the individual film, and yet this approach is misleading, for over the first 25 years of projected moving pictures, from 1895 to 1920, the individual film was of little

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