Friday, September 21, 2007

THE EXHIBITION OF MOVING PICTURES IS A BUSINESS, PURE AND SIMPLE: As I tried to argue in our last class, the arrival of an entirely new medium, such as sound recording, always marks a pivotal moment in pop-culture history. Unfortunately, it's often hard for us to appreciate just how pivotal such moments were -- since we cannot even imagine our popular culture without or before those media. The same imaginative challenge surfaces when we talk about the birth of motion pictures: just think how astonishing it must have been to see photographic images actually appear to move across a screen! (Though exactly why those images appear to move is still a matter of some dispute.)

The technological developments behind movies proceeded pretty rapidly. Thomas Edison's 1891 kinetoscope allowed viewers to look into a "peep hole" and watch a short film unspooling inside. While kinetscopes proved an amusing novelty, inventors soon realized that the real commercial potential lay in projectors for public exhibition: the Vitascope, the Cinematographe, the Biograph. By the turn of the century, movies had become featured attractions in vaudeville halls and traveling shows, and in 1905 films got their own dedicated theaters with the rise of the nickelodeon. (No, Dora had nothing to do with it.)

Within a couple of years, American cities were in the grip of "nickel madness." Movies especially appealed to immigrant and working-class audiences. After all, silent films were cheap, exciting, and understandable to anyone regardless of education or language. Many of these early movies appear unremarkable and innocuous to us today: from a kissing couple to a traveling train, from assorted vaudeville acts to re-enactments of the Spanish-American War. But the wonder of moving pictures in itself was enough to draw huge crowds, and the development of narrative "story films," like Edwin S. Porter's The Great Train Robbery (1903), introduced new subjects and additional techniques (such as cross-cutting, stunt work, and special effects) that made the movies even more compelling.

But as Daniel Czitrom explains in Media and the American Mind (excerpted in our textbook), critics increasingly worried about the possible dangers of motion pictures -- the dark, unhealthy theaters; the uneducated, impressionable audiences; and especially the morally questionable content of the films themselves. Too many movies, critics said, featured outlaw heroes, loose women, and a whole menu of vices. Civic groups, religious leaders, and politicians called for local review boards to censor motion pictures; film producers, distributors, and exhibitors, on the other hand, claimed "freedom of expression." In 1915, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that motion pictures were not covered by the First Amendment -- in part because movies were not "organs of public opinion" but "a business, pure and simple," but also because movies' extraordinary "power" over their viewers made them "capable of evil" and therefore a potential threat to civil order.

So, ThingThrowers, let's try to put ourselves in the seats of those old nickelodeons. Leave aside today's complaints about audience members on cell phones and lousy customer service, and focus purely on film-as-medium. Do movies still hold a sense of wonder for you? Do they still possess the "power" that the Court worried about in 1915? Is the experience of sitting in a darkened theater watching larger-than-life images flicker across your retinas still something special, something powerful? If so, why? If not, why not?

Next week: Birth of a Nation, the rise of the movie star, and the New Woman.

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