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American Cinema to World War I

Moving pictures projected on a screen appeared first as a novelty in the mid 1890s US. It was one among a variety of entertainments in vaudeville halls, amusement parks, circuses and other traveling shows. Within a decade, thousands of new venues showed films exclusively, cropping up in vacant storefronts with rudimentary furnishings and equipment. They became known as nickelodeons for their cheap admission. For the first time, a commercial entertainment was becoming available almost every day, often morning to night, in almost every town, large or small, and affordable to almost every American. Such availability of commercial entertainment was new for the vast majority of people.1 Watching entertainment was supplanting participation in it, and purchased entertainment was replacing home-made.

Movies increasingly gained a permanent place in the built environment and the culture. Within another decade, these makeshift places were being supplanted by theaters with raked floors and fixed seats, either converted from former drama or variety houses or newly purpose-built for movies. The films themselves increased in length from a few minutes to an hour or more, telling more complicated tales. They became a new form of fiction, alongside print, before radio and less expensive than stage. Millions took advantage of the new availability and the new fiction to become movie-goers.

Such widespread availability and popularity could not but influence culture. A culture specific to movies and movie-going, a screen culture would emerge from this new experience, as would broader cultural changes, propelled by great structural changes in the whole society. This new screen culture did not go unnoticed, especially when numerous poor and untutored were flocking to the movies. Early on, journalists, reformers, government officials and elites of all sorts began to ask whether movies were changing people, culture and society for better or worse.

With a century of hindsight, we address what screen culture arose around movies and movie-going at the time, and what influence that did have on the broader culture. We will lay the groundwork for understanding screen culture by examining its development in the US, by far the largest film market at the time. Screen culture is not simply film texts and their manufacture, but a living culture that people made and expressed collectively, as audiences and more. This was especially true in this era when audiences were most active and much discussed in public discourse. Therefore, audiences and the circumstances of their audiencing will be the primary focus here. We will begin with local culture and conditions before film, then with the arrival of film and its incorporation into that context by its audiences and by the communities beyond the theater.

Historical Context

Sociologists Robert and Helen Merrill Lynd, in their classic Middletown studies, provide before and after snapshots of a small midwestern industrial city around 1900 and again in 1923, with which we can measure changes before and after the arrival of movies.2 The population of 20,000 in 1900 was overwhelmingly white and native born. The first automobile arrived in 1900 at a time when most townsfolk walked to work and for relaxation on a Sunday afternoon; only a few well-off families used a horse-drawn carriage. Traveling players (minstrels, stock companies, circuses) occasionally arrived for a one-night stand in towns like this and nearly the whole town would attend. The Lynds commented, "To be sure, the spectacle-watching habit was strong upon Middletown in the nineties. Whenever they had a chance people turned out to a 'show,' but chances were relatively few" - fewer than 125 performances for the entire year. In small towns like Middletown across America, such shows were staged at the main street opera house, typically a second-floor room with a flat floor to facilitate multipurpose use that hosted meetings of local groups, local dances and traveling players.

In the absence of commercial entertainment, pianos and print served middle-class families for diversion in the home. Girls were expected to play the piano to entertain their family and their guests at home; and it was a common practice for one of the family to read to everyone during the evenings. Working-class men and women had less leisure time and the Lynds noted little more than to say they read, but less.3

By the early 1920s Middletown had two passenger cars for every three families, and motoring beyond the town center became a new form of leisure which was especially popular among teens. Movies had made entertainment a permanent fixture and a regular part of the week instead of a special event. The town had grown to a population of 38,000. The Lynds reported for 1923:

. nine motion picture theaters operate from 1 to 11pm seven days a week summer and winter; four give three different programs a week, the other five having two a week; thus twenty-two different programs with a total of over 300 performances [per week] . About two and three-fourths times the city's entire population attended the nine motion picture theaters during July 1923, the 'valley' month, and four and one-half times in the 'peak' month of December.

Movies made commercial entertainment an everyday presence even in this small midwest industrial town. Children attended more than other family members and often without their parents. The Lynds claimed that the automobile and the movies had a "decentralizing tendency" on the family, allowing children and teens to enjoy recreation without their parents. By the mid 1920s, automobiles, movies and radio were thought by local businessmen to reduce community participation, as people did things more often as individuals, families, or small groups.4 Film histories have documented similar stories in other regions. The trade magazine Moving Picture World heralded fancy new movie theater buildings even in small cities.5

At the same time, the change depended upon place. Half the US population still lived outside even small towns of 2,500, and rural life in 1920 remained much as it was in 1900. Movie houses in nearby towns and cities were not readily accessible. Many rural families were still on the margins of a money economy and consumer culture, still producing much of their own food, shelter and clothing. Even those who were not poor bought few things compared to urban dwellers. For purchases, they often relied on credit from local merchants until harvest, when they were paid for their crops. While for the urban family the nickelodeon was a short walk from home, for rural families any commercial entertainment required traveling miles by horse on dirt roads that were seasonally impassable. Even mail was infrequent then. During winters, many endured long periods of isolation. For them, movies were less familiar and important than radio a decade later, which brought timely weather information and regular entertainment into their homes. Rural families most often continued to amuse themselves, using inherited skills and resources to tell stories and make music and toys. Only as paved roads, electrification and radio brought the world into rural homes and lives, did the gap between rural and urban life begin to lessen.6

At the other extreme, even before 1900, big cities with sufficient populations to supply a steady stream of customers had well-established, permanent, purpose-built venues for entertainments of varied prices and tastes, in a variety of neighborhoods and even languages. By comparison, in small cities, populations were too few and cultural modernization too muted to sustain anything but intermittent visits by itinerant players. At the turn of the century, much was made of the differences between big cities and small cities and towns in rural settings far from metropolitan centers. A wide range of writers from novelists to journalists to sociologists around the turn of the century took note of the psychological impact of cities' density, constant stimulation and anonymity, and a whole genre of writing dwelt on the suffocating society of small towns and the lonely and dangerous anonymity in big cities.7

Some recent scholarship focusing on big cities explains the rise of cinema as an aspect of a singular larger cultural phenomenon, urban modernism or modernity. According to such theses, urbanization and industrialization created "constant sensory change, nervous stimulation, feverish stress, speed," psychological states that produced alienation and reshaped the culture. But the term elides examination of social and economic structures such as capitalism and class differences or specific cultural changes underlying the label.8 Around the turn of the twentieth century, compelling historical forces were bringing deep and broad structural changes to the US: industrial capitalism, urbanization and immigration. At the end of the nineteenth century, American industrial capitalism was becoming concentrated in the hands of huge corporations that matured and solidified in this era, establishing a new structural foundation to the society that would displace and gradually marginalize the agricultural, localized world that preceded it. Urbanization was increasing with it. In 1900 a quarter (26%) of the population lived in cities of 25,000 or more; in 1920 that had risen to more than a third (36%). Historian...