306 pages

English

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University of Exeter Press - Joe Kember

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306 pages

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In this innovative study of early film exhibition, Joe Kember demonstrates that prior to the emergence of a specific discipline of screen acting and the arrival of picture personalities, the early cinema inherited its human dimensions from diverse earlier traditions of performance, from the magic lantern lecture to the fairground and variety theatre.

Uncovering new sources, including previously neglected films, industrial documentation, memoirs, trade and popular periodicals, the book reveals a rich landscape of popular entertainments during the mid to late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and charts the development of film institutions in relation to this complex industrial context.

Marketing Modernity re-evaluates the relationship between early film and the broader cultural conditions of industrial modernity. Investigating such diverse topics as performance practices in music hall and magic theatre, the celebrity of adventurer-cameramen, and the exhibition of everyday life on screen, Kember argues that early film shows offered new opportunities to recover a sense of intimacy – a quality that was popularly considered to be under threat in the rapidly modernising world of the 1890s and 1900s.

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Publié par	University of Exeter Press
Date de parution	02 mars 2015
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9780859899321
Langue	English
Poids de l'ouvrage	1 Mo

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,5625€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

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Marketing Modernity

Victorian Popular Shows and Early Cinema

J O E K E M B E R

E X E T E R S T U D I E S I N F I L M H I S T O R Y

Marketing Modernity

Marketing Modernityis a cultural history of the early British film industry. It explains the social and institutional continuities that underpinned the market for popular entertainments in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In this innovative study of early film exhibition,Joe Kemberreveals a rich landscape of performance and business practices taking place in venues ranging from the magic lantern lecture to the fairground and variety theatre. Uncovering new sources, including previously neglected films, industrial documentation, memoirs, trade and popular periodicals, the book charts the development of film institutions in relation to this complex social and commercial context.

Joe Kemberis Senior Lecturer in Film at the University of Exeter.

Exeter Studies in Film History

Published by University of Exeter Press in association with the Bill Douglas Centre for the History of Cinema and Popular Culture Series Editors:Richard Maltby,Professor of Screen Studies, Flinders University, South Australia andSteve Neale,Professor of Film Studies and Academic Director of the Bill Douglas Centre, University of Exeter

Parallel Tracks: The Railroad and Silent Cinema Lynne Kirby () The World According to Hollywood,– Ruth Vasey () ‘Film Europe’ and ‘Film America’: Cinema, Commerce and Cultural Exchange– edited by Andrew Higson and Richard Maltby () A Paul Rotha Reader edited by Duncan Petrie and Robert Kruger () A Chorus of Raspberries: British Film Comedy– David Sutton () The Great Art of Light and Shadow: Archaeology of the Cinema Laurent Mannoni, translated by Richard Crangle () Popular Filmgoing ins Britain: A Choice of Pleasures John Sedgwick () Alternative Empires: European Modernist Cinemas and Cultures of Imperialism Martin Stollery () Hollywood, Westerns and thes: The Lost Trail Peter Stanfield () Young and Innocent? The Cinema in Britain– edited by Andrew Higson () Legitimate Cinema: Theatre Stars in Silent British Films– Jon Burrows () The Big Show: British Cinema Culture in the Great War (–) Michael Hammond () Multimedia Histories: From the Magic Lantern to the Internet edited by James Lyons and John Plunkett () Going to the Movies: Hollywood and the Social Experience of Cinema edited by Richard Maltby, Melvyn Stokes and Robert C. Allen () Alternative Film Culture in InterWar Britain Jamie Sexton () British Cinema and Middlebrow Culture in the Interwar Years Lawrence Napper ()

UEP also publishes the celebrated fivevolume series looking at the early years of English cinema,The Beginnings of the Cinema in England, by John Barnes.

Marketing Modernity Victorian Popular Shows and Early Cinema

Joe Kember

First published inby University of Exeter Press Reed Hall, Streatham Drive Exeter  UK www.exeterpress.co.uk

The right of Joe Kember to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Acts.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN    

Typeset in Caslon by XL Publishing Services, Tiverton Printed in Great Britain by SRP Ltd, Exeter

List of Illustrations Acknowledgements

Introduction

Contents

Performing Intimacy: An Institutional Account of Early Film Debating Modernity Space, Time, and the Problem of Empathy An Institutional Account of Early Film Film Personae: Presence, Performance, and Personality

Expertise and Trust: Popular Lecturing Traditions and Early Film Spectacular Entertainments and the Development of the Illustrated Lecture Lantern Lectures and Lantern Culture Lecturing Traditions in the Early Film Show

Knowing Better: Traditions of Showmanship and Early Film Anecdote and Institution The Business of Showmanship Showmen and the Cinematograph

‘Oh, there’s our Mary!’ Performance Onscreen Early Genres and Other Distinctions Performing Presence: Strategies of SelfPresentation in Selected Early Genres Dramatic Characterisation and Performance Styles in Early Fiction Films Representation of the Face in Early British Film Otherness, Objectification—and Empathy

vi vii



    



  

   

 



  

Conjurors, Adventurers, and Other Authors Conjurors and the Definition of Film Fiction Keeping it Real: The Camera Operator as Adventurer Telling Tales, Owning Films

Conclusion: Early Institutional Cinemas

Notes Bibliography Index

Fig.

Fig.

Fig.

Fig.

Fig.

Fig.

List of Illustrations

Cartoon depicting mutoscope use;The Showman (March,), p. The Showman’s perspective on safety regulations; The Showman(March), p. Advertisement for Warwick Trading Company; The Showman(December), p. Advertisement for Walter Gibbons’ films of the funeral of Queen Victoria;The Showman (February), p. Four slides from lantern sequence, ‘Sarah’s Christmas Pudding’ (courtesy of the Bill Douglas Centre for the History of Cinema and Popular Culture, Exeter) Images from Burton Holmes Travelogue, ‘Into Morocco’, in Burton Holmes,The Burton Holmes Lectures,vols (Battle Creek, Michigan: The Little Preston Company,), I, pp.,

   



  









‒



Acknowledgements

This book has been several books. At various stages it has been a history of early British film narrative, of Victorian performance practices and media tion, and an analysis of the development of early film institutions; its final shape I owe to the encouragement and scrutiny of numerous colleagues. Erica Sheen’s guidance when this project began as a thesis at the University of Sheffield has stuck with me, and continues to inform my thinking. The structure and scope of the book are the consequence of a great many conver sations with friends and colleagues. I thank them all: Vanessa Toulmin, for telling me about the many greatest shows on earth, for directing me to so much fascinating and wonderful material, and for her helpful reading of extracts of the final draft of the manuscript; Steve Neale, for convincing me, twice in writing and numerous times in between, that it was all worth saying; Simon Popple, for encouraging me to speak about so many bits of it to so many excellent people; John Plunkett, for understanding the manuscript, and for information on the doorknob at the Egyptian Hall; Patricia Zakreski, for steering me through the wilds of Victorian popular culture and for constructive ridicule of my longest sentences. Among the many helpful contributions I have received at conferences and seminars, I would particu larly like to mention the generosity of film historians Richard Brown and Tony Fletcher. Many thanks go to all of my colleagues at the Universities of Exeter and Teesside. The Film Studies team and the Centre for Victo rian Studies at Exeter have provided a diverse and stimulating research environment in which to think, and write, and learn. But I could not have completed this book without the help of numerous other individuals and institutions. My series editor, Richard Maltby, has been generous and insightful and provided me with as eloquent an evalua tion of my analysis as you could possibly hope for. Simon Baker and Helen Gannon at the University of Exeter Press have been rigorous, attentive, and helpful throughout. Thanks go to the AHRC, British Academy, and the Universities of Sheffield and Teesside, all of which have funded my research for this book at various times. I also owe a great many thanks to the imagi

vii

nation and flair of librarians and curators at the Bill Douglas Centre and Special Collections at the University of Exeter, the National Fairground Archive at Sheffield, the National Film and Television Archive in London, the National Media Museum at Bradford, the John Johnson collection at the Bodleian Library, the Guildhall Library, Templeman Library Special Collections at the University of Kent, the Tampa Library at the University of South Florida, and The British Library. Special thanks go to Peter Jewell, who more than once has pointed me to gems in the Bill Douglas Centre, and to Noel Chanan, who has generously granted me access to his extensive collection of books and ephemera. Earlier versions of extracts from Chapters,, andhave appeared in the journals,Living Pictures,Early Popular Visual Culture,The Velvet Light Trap, and in the bookThe Showman, the Spectacle, and the TwoMinute Silence: Performing British Cinema Before, eds Alan Burton and Larraine Porter (Trowbridge: Flicks Books,).

To my Mum, Dad, and brother, thank you. And Tricia, again: you know by now that I could not have finished this book so often without you!

This book is dedicated to Will and Merry who seem to know everything already.

viii

Exeter, August

Introduction

There is not, there never was, an inventor of the Living Picture. Say that it grew from an infinitely small germ, as unlike its present form as the butterfly is unlike the egg from which it evolves; say that many minds have each contributed, and still are contributing their mite towards the realisation of that perfection yet to be attained; say that the Living Picture is the work of nineteenthcentury civilised man—and the state 1 ment will be as true as any generalisation can be.

The living picture, as Hopwood incisively remarked, already had a long and complex history by the end of the nineteenth century. Its origins were nebu lous and difficult to define, and its ‘perfection’ had been and would remain a cherished ambition. Cutting through the competing claims for pioneer ship that bywere already being made by a number of inventors and entrepreneurs, Hopwood sketches a much grander evolutionary schema, in which the moving pictures appear as the logical outcome, even the epitome of nineteenthcentury ingenuity, enthusiasm and labour. The question of origins has remained controversial within studies of early film ever since. Occasionally, early squabbles concerning invention and pioneership persist within scholarly work on what are now more often called only tentatively and conditionally, the ‘pre’ and ‘early’ cinemas. However, in the past twentyfive years, new debates concerning the accretion of tech nologies and visual conventions governing the production of moving images and of associated conventions for viewing such images have come to domi nate research. In place of a developmental teleology, which inevitably privileges the formation of what selected kinds of cinema would become, work concerning cinema’s antecedents has increasingly been seen as a contri bution to an ‘archaeology of cinema’, uncovering multiple lines of influence and seeking to demonstrate that cinema was not a privileged form, but devel 2 oped amongst a heterogeneous collection of other media practices. Similarly, early film historians, publishing on an increasingly broad range of topics from thes, have justifiably opposed the commonly held idea that