Cinema, Audiences and Modernity

New perspectives on European cinema history

Daniel Biltereyst, Richard Maltby, Philippe Meers

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN:
  9781136641992
• Topic: Mezzi di comunicazione e arti performative
• Subtopic: Scienze della comunicazione

This book sheds new light on the cinema and modernity debate by confronting established theories on the role of the modern cinematic experience with new empirical work on the history of the social experience of cinema-going, film audiences and film exhibition.

The book provides a wide range of research methodologies and perspectives on these matters, including:

• the use of oral history methods
• questionnaires
• diaries
• audience letters
• as well as industrial, sociological and other accounts on historical film audiences.

The collection's case studies thus provide a "how to" compendium of current methodologies for researchers and students working on film and media audiences, film and media experiences, and historical reception.

The volume is part of a 'new cinema history' effort within film and screen studies to look at film history not only as a history of production, textual relations or movies-as-artefacts, but rather to concentrate more on the receiving end, the social experience of cinema, and the engagement of film/cinema (history) 'from below'. The contributions to the volume reflect upon the very different ways in which cinema has been accepted, rejected or disciplined as an agent of modernity in neighbouring parts of Europe, and how cinema-going has been promoted and regulated as a popular social practice at different times in twentieth-century European history.

1

CINEMA, AUDIENCES AND MODERNITY

An Introduction

Daniel Biltereyst, Richard Maltby and Philippe Meers

With this system which consists, before going into a movie theatre, of never looking to see what’s playing – which, moreover, would scarcely do me any good, since I cannot remember the names of more than five or six actors – I obviously run the risk of missing more than others, though here I must confess my weakness for the most absolutely absurd French films.

André Breton¹

In Nadja (1928), one of the landmark modernist novels of the 1920s, French surrealist writer André Breton included a one-page description of how he used to go to the movies. In a mixture of provocation, nostalgia and humour, Breton talked about a ‘system’ of cinemagoing which consisted of never looking at the programme before entering a cinema. Hoping to be surprised by the ‘most absolutely absurd’ French pictures, Breton mostly went to low-grade movie houses in popular areas of Paris, where people talked loudly, gave their opinions about what was happening on the screen, and where he and his friends could openly eat and drink while consuming a picture. His account of opening cans, slicing bread, uncorking bottles ‘as if around a table’ in a cinema is interesting not only for its typically surrealist provocative stance or the Surrealists’ fascination for the imaginative world of cinema and its merger with everyday life. In her insightful analysis of this and other surrealist writings on the experience of cinema, Jenny Lefcourt forcefully argues that Breton’s cinemagoing system and his description of what happened in Parisian lower-class cinemas were not unique or exaggerated at all.² Bringing to life what he had experienced in the years following the First World War, the paragraph had a nostalgic tone, along with a strong documentary value in its description of the unwritten rules of popular cinema culture, which included talking, eating, drinking and much more, and which seemed to be fading away as ‘spectatorial practices’ were ‘homogenized’ along bourgeois rules of conduct.³ Breton’s description of the cinema of the ‘man in the street’ as a quite savage, uncontrolled site thus incorporated a critical disapproval of how cinema in modern society underwent a gradual process of disciplining through capitalist and bourgeois notions of social order, elitism and cultural distinction.⁴

This book is not about Paris in the 1920s, the Surrealists, or the type of elitist, modernist cinema with which they are often associated. Rather, it concentrates on the experiences and social practice of ordinary moviegoing that Breton looked back on so nostalgically. Although the contributions to this volume deal with various historical European contexts, they all address everyday film culture from a perspective that differs from Breton’s principally in its investigative rather than nostalgic tone. The case studies in this book are not primarily concerned with film programmes, stars and authors, or with films as meaningful texts, but rather move towards considering their distribution, exhibition and reception. In their effort to understand exhibition practices, spectatorship and the site of consuming movies, the contributions make a conceptual break with the idea of the movie theatre as a closed space where people are immersed in darkness and where they are submerged in the thrills and shocks of the film spectacle. Trying not to look at audiences as figures constructed by the cinematic apparatus or by particular film texts or genres, the authors insist on moviegoing being conceived as a social act performed by people of flesh and blood, who actively engage with movies and with other people, firmly situated within specific social, cultural, historical and spatial confines. This turn to reception, moreover, goes beyond looking at viewing experiences, cinemagoing practices, or programming and exhibition strategies used to attract or influence those audiences. Like Breton’s conception of cinema as a shifting site of ideological struggle and discipline, most of the chapters in this book address wider societal, political and other forces in historicizing film spectatorship, moviegoing and exhibition. Their case studies illustrate how practices and discourses about cinema as a dominant form of leisure in the twentieth century were subjected to or influenced by intermediate forces that included both hard and explicitly disciplining authorities such as state film censorship or military film policy, and the softer forms of power exercised by religious organizations or labour movements.

In its assessment of the wider historical conditions of the cinematic experience, this book joins other efforts by film researchers to cope with the social history of cinema. Since the 1990s, questions of the institutional and economic dimensions of film exhibition, of film programming and exhibition strategies, and of other issues concerning audiences’ reception of movies, their memories of cinemagoing and their encounter with the site of cinema, have been high on the research agenda.⁵ This broad scholarly examination of film reception has gone hand in hand with an empirical, historical and spatial turn in film studies, and with a criticism of what Robert C. Allen has called the persistent ambivalence within dominant strains of film studies ‘toward anything that exists outside the text and beyond the edges of the screen’.⁶ Scholars working on the ‘flesh and blood human beings who go to cinemas to see films’ criticized the fact that the film-centredness of arts- and humanities-based film studies usually implied text-based constructions and theory-led conceptualizations of the spectator in which, as Annette Kuhn argued, films were taken ‘as the starting point for exploring the cinema–consumer relationship’.⁷ Work by Kuhn and others on bottom-up experiences and memories of cinemagoing not only reconfirmed ideas of audience activity, selectivity and power in a historical context, but also underlined the extent to which cinemagoing was remembered as part of the fabric and routine of social life, thereby questioning the relevance of the movies themselves. Asking whether ‘cinematic texts really matter’, Allen brought forward the (for some provocative) conclusion that ‘generally speaking, for many people in many places for a very long span of film history, the cumulative social experience of habitual or even occasional moviegoing mattered more than any particular film they might have seen’.⁸

Acknowledging that these approaches to film exhibition, audiences and cinemagoing experiences offer an alternative mode of studying key issues in film history, ranging from the relevance of the film canon to wider questions of power in the cinematic circuit of cultural production, Richard Maltby has proposed a distinction between ‘film history’ and ‘cinema history’. While the former primarily deals with an ‘aesthetic history of textual relations’, the latter is concerned with the ‘social history of a cultural institution’, or with questions of distribution, exhibition, reception and the ‘social experience of cinema’.⁹ This ‘new cinema history’, which according to Maltby has now ‘achieved critical mass and methodological maturity’, involves the usage of several approaches, coming from history, cultural geography, demography, ethnography and other disciplines within the social sciences.¹⁰ While several overviews of US research on film exhibition and reception have been published in recent years, access to much of the European work in the field has been restricted to those who read the local language.¹¹ One of the aims of this book is to fill in this gap by making some of the most innovative studies on film exhibition structures, programming strategies and audiences available to an English-speaking audience. A second aim is to provide a basis of evidence for examining the similarities and differences between the experiences of historical audiences in Europe and the US.¹²

This book is, however, more than a showcase of new cinema history work originating from different European countries. The contributions also all address questions to do with the relationship between cinema and the experiences of metropolitan urbanity and modernity, which has been one of the key debates in film history and theory in the last two decades.¹³ Since the end of the 1980s, film researchers have argued that cinema was both a consequence and a vital component of modern life.¹⁴ Drawing variously on the writings of Charles Baudelaire on the experience of modernity, Georg Simmel’s sociology of space, the metropolis and subjective life, or the work of Walter Benjamin and other early writers on film and mass-mediated modernity, proponents of what David Bordwell has called the ‘modernity thesis’ emphasized the extent to which early movies reflected the shocks, thrills and fragmented experiences of modern urban life, and speculated that this kind of cinema worked as a catalyst for the experience of modern life by influencing human perception.¹⁵ The modernity thesis proposed that the disruptive economic, social and cultural effects of urbanization and industrialization created a state of constant sensory change, nervous stimulation, feverish stress, speed and bodily peril, and that cinema both reflected this state and was a consequence of it, promoting a particular gaze or form of perception. In a summary of this work, Tom Gunning suggested that movies reflected modernity’s disruption of social order by representing ‘the experience of urban life with its threats and danger’, embracing ‘modern technology or new environments’, focusing on ‘female subjectivity’, and emphasizing ‘the heightened involvement of a viewer in a visual illusion combined with motion’.¹⁶ Referring to modernity as a culture of shocks and cinema as a reflection of this, Gunning’s concept of the cinema of attractions identified a type of filmmaking that solicited spectator attention through visual curiosity, exciting spectacle, surprise, newness, fragmentation and splintered montage.¹⁷

This collection does not want to discard some of the excellent work within this literature on cinema, metropolis and modernity, nor do we want to reduce the arguments and rhetoric of the modernity thesis ad absurdum. Many of these arguments, however, have been heavily criticized by leading scholars in the field such as Bordwell, Allen and Noël Carroll. The thesis’ propositions about changes in human perception brought about by the condition of modern life have been strongly challenged, as have claims about the role played in this process by motion pictures.¹⁸ Concentrating on a stylistic history of films, Bordwell argued that many early movies did not reflect a ‘culture of splintered experience’ and questioned the attempt to tie stylistic aspects of early cinema to modern experience and the fragmentation of urban life.¹⁹ In a recent book on modernity and early cinema, Joe Kember summarized this criticism by arguing that the modernity thesis takes a quite restricted view of modernity, and that the proponents of the thesis tend to exaggerate the reflection of urban modernity in movies and pay less attention to alternative styles. Kember provides examples of early filmmakers demonstrating ‘a fascination with bucolic rural life’ and ‘with exotic locations’, suggesting a complex interplay between cinema and a more nuanced conception of modernity.²⁰ In his work on the attractiveness of early cinema, Kember argues that film institutions tended to market modernity by explicitly promoting cinema’s capacity to offer spectacular and disruptive material, but at the same time they invested heavily in reaffirming ‘normative descriptions of social identity’. Early film shows, he argues, tried to stitch themselves ‘into the fabric of everyday life’, and a ‘substantial part of the enterprise of such shows involved a revalidation of existing concepts of selfhood and community on behalf of audiences’. Rather than breaking down traditional notions of community, Kember suggests, the film industry ‘participated fully in modernity’s fascination with, and repackaging of, very traditional social forms’.²¹ As a result,

early cinema needs to be seen as a dynamic, responsive environment which developed multiple relationships – sometimes at the same time – with its varied audiences, and which therefore proliferated experiences of intimacy, empathy, curiosity, reassurance and mastery for individual spectators in place of those it was widely accused of undermining.²²

A key issue in this critical reconsideration of cinematic modernity and its relation to tradition, community and everyday life, is the role of the audience.²³ Summarizing criticism of the modernity thesis’ conceptualization of spectatorship, Kathryn Fuller-Seeley and George Potamianos have argued that it tends ‘to transform viewers and their culture, the surrounding theatres and streets, into a vast, anonymous, homogeneous, mass audience’.²⁴ It postulates a phenomenologically conceived and an apparatus-led spectator who, according to Italian film theorist Francesco Casetti, is ‘immersed in the spectacle and the environment’, in which the ‘cinematographic apparatus … encourages a fusion between subject and object and between subject and environment’. This account of spectatorship endows it with a ‘double segregation’, where the ‘spectator cannot physically touch the screen and what is on it’, but ‘neither can he or she share intimacy with the other spectators’. Elaborating on Foucault’s theories on discipline, social control and the Panoptic gaze, Casetti describes modern cinema as an apparatus that renders ‘the subjects – particularly their bodies – “docile.”’ ²⁵ Modernity theorists have also developed textually inscribed notions of spectatorship. Mary Ann Doane, for instance, has argued that the ‘form of the films’ encouraged ‘spectatorial absorption and submission to an irreversible time’ and has advanced some significant propositions about the movie theatre’s style of architecture as encouraging a new sense of control, order and safety. Interestingly, Doane confronts this view with some paragraphs on the actual ‘viewing situation’ in turn-of-the-century working-class movie houses, which was, as she admits, chaotic, boisterous, sociable and interactive.²⁶

In recent years, proponents of the modernity thesis have also argued for a more complex definition of modernity and have re-evaluated conceptions of cinematic style, cinema’s influence on perception, and its reflection of and relation to modernity at large.²⁷ But the thesis’ master paradigm on film spectatorship has as yet remained unchallenged by a confrontation with more grounded empirical evidence on the reception of cinema and on real audiences’ cinemagoing practices. One of this book’s aims is to stage some scenes from that confrontation. As well as seeking to avoid sweeping generalizations about film audiences by examining them empirically in specific historical terms, this book embraces the idea of a multiple and more dynamic definition of modernity. This definition refers to critical social theory’s account of the ambivalences of modernity, in which counter-forces or alternative traditions of modernity compete with hegemonic or culturally dominant forms of it.²⁸ While this more dynamic model is one of the recurrent items in recent re-assessments of the cinema/modernity thesis, it remains unclear how this might be operationalized in empirical historical film research.²⁹ The chapters of this book present a range of positions on the cinema–modernity thesis, and it is important to begin by acknowledging that some ideas and insights tend to confirm aspects of the thesis’ view. Annemone Ligensa’s chapter on Berlin elaborates on the metropolis as the site of cinema and nervous relentlessness, while Andrea Haller’s account of ‘Flimmeritis’ in the German pre-First World War period emphasizes the role of film theatres as a site o...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures and tables
• Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• 1. Cinema, audiences and modernity: an introduction
• Part I: Cinema, Tradition and Community
• Part II: Audiences, Modernity and Cultural Exchange
• Index