The audiences most likely to experience vicariously the film’s aesthetic and visual pleasure are those distracted also by the phantasmagoria of a developing urban space. A period between the two world wars, the 1930s, often nostalgically and memorably called “the golden age of the cinema,” witnessed not only the
development of the cinema into the “dream industry” but also that of cinemas into a new urban, public space of entertainment, consumption, and sociability. Being a material space, the spectacular super-cinemas emerging in the city since the 1910s is part of the dream industry producing illusion on and off the screen. As the screen conveys diegetic illusion effectively, so the cinema built like a “dream palace” serves to reinforce the illusionist effects of not only viewing but also going to those pictures.
These lavishly decorated cinema-buildings, designed in a wide variety of styles, became themselves “escapist fantasies.” The décor and accoutrements, sweeping marble staircases, silvery fountains, uniformed staff, and glittering chandeliers all provide a real-life extension of the dream world of the screen.94 As a social space, the
94 See Rachael Low, History of British Film, vol. 3 (London: Routledge, 1997) 16-17. Low quotes the description of the Tower Cinema as super-cinema from the 1914 November 26 Bioscope, a prominent British trade journal of this period: “. . . a handsome marble and mosaic stairway, with three gangways of ample proportions, leading to a crush hall equaling in size many an ordinary cinema. This noble place alone can accommodate 1,000 waiting patrons, and with its marble tiling, dadoes, and grand staircase, and with tapestry panels for the higher portions of the wall, presents a sumptuous effect, still further enhanced by leaded domes and the use of cornice lighting. Choice palms here and there, floral
cinema invites indistinguishably its urban patrons, regardless of their gender, class and age. Yet the frequency and demographic distribution of those going to the pictures in the early twentieth-century cities is unequally divided by audiences whose interests and tastes vary according to a matrix of class, gender, age, and education. As the documents and statistics indicate, these audiences are mostly women, young people, and the working class.95
Over the past two decades, social historians have unearthed the significance of the early cinema as an alternative public space. Unlike earlier scholars mapping a bourgeois, homogeneous public sphere, these historians reconstruct the early cinema as a hetero-social public space particularly catering for the proletarian masses.96 Rather than condemning consumerism for contaminating the public sphere, they have a more positive view on the impact consumer culture has exerted over the making of the early cinema as a public space. Their studies show that more than any other forms
decorations, and, midway to the circle, a luxurious lounge, complete a remarkable ensemble. In one corner, under the terrace lounge, is an Otis passenger lift for the use of rush nights of circle patrons.
From the lounge one ascend a paneled oak stairway to the circle, whence is gained an adequate idea of the huge proportions of the house.” As well as catering for the emerging consuming masses, there is a strategic reason for such transformation form nickelodeon to a theater-like screening plaza—the early cinema strived to raise its social and cultural status as high art and thus made the screening space resemble the theater in order to level with theater-going experience. While the early cinema is indeed an egalitarian public space at first, the effort to make itself look more splendid is also a way to move upward on hierarchy.
95 See Jeffrey Richards, The Age of the Dream Palace: Cinema and Society in Britain 1930-1939 (London: Routledge, 1989) 13-15.
96 In his 1962 book The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, the German sociologist Jűrgen Habermas famously argues that the emergence of new institutions including the print media in the early modern Europe has contributed to the opening up of public affairs to scrutiny by citizens. Although setting up a paradigm for later studies of the public sphere, Habermas has nevertheless been criticized for his over-emphasizing an idealized bourgeois, homogeneous public sphere and overlooking the significance of the mass media shaping an alternative, proletarian public sphere. For scholars disagreeing with Habermas on his endorsing a bourgeois conception of the public sphere, see Oskar Negt and Alexander Kluge, Public Sphere and Experience: Toward an Analysis of the Bourgeois and Proletarian Public Sphere, trans. Peter Labanyi, Jamie Daniel, and Assenka Oksiloff (Minneapolis:
Minnesota UP, 1993); Miriam Hansen, Babel and Babylon: Spectatorship in American Silent Film;
Miriam Hansen, “America, Paris, the Alps: Kracauer (and Benjamin) on Cinema and Modernity,”
Cinema and the Invention of Modern Life, ed. Leo Charney and Vaneessa R. Schwartz (Berkeley:
California UP, 1995) 374-84; James Donald and Stephanie Hemelryk, “The Publicness of Cinema,”
Reinventing Film Studies, ed. Christine Gledhill and Linda Williams (London: Arnold, 2000) 114-29.
of entertainment in the early twentieth century, the cinema opened up a social space in the masses’ lives because of its neighborhood character, low admission fee, egalitarian seating structure, and informal atmosphere.97 Allowing for the mixing with friends, acquaintances, and even strangers, the cinema is becoming a respectable site for experiencing diversity. Besides, providing fantasy, pleasure, and distraction, the early cinema is also a venue for the masses wanting a momentary relief from their everyday boredom and surveillance. Especially for the immigrants, the working class, and women indulging the anonymous, modern form of leisure, the early cinema means a threshold, a liminal space mediating the ethnic, class, and gender demarcations of their everyday life.98
These revisionist views on the early cinema shed much light on Richardson’s observations of the cinema-going masses and the cinema as an emerging public space in the late 1920s London. In her “ethnographical” observations on the fellow
cinema-goers, Richardson represents the early cinema as a public space for the heterogeneous viewing public. Frequenting London’s cinemas, large and small, Richardson observes that the cinema is a place embracing all kinds of urban
pleasure-seekers. For her, the cinema is a “refuge, a trysting-place, a shelter from rain and cold at less than the price of an evening’s light and fire” (171). It is a place of
97 See Shelley Stamp, Movie-struck Girls: Women and Motion Picture Culture after the Nickelodeon;
Roy Rosenzweig, Eight Hours for What We Will: Workers and Leisure in an Industrial City, 1870-1920;
Elizabeth Ewan, Immigrant Women in the land of Dollars: Life and Culture in the Lower Easter Side, 1890-1925; Kathy Peiss, Cheap Amusements: Working Women and Leisure in Turn-of-the-Century New York.
98 As the film and social historian Miriam Hansen puts it, the early cinema was a real place, ordinary and easily accessible, yet at the same time it was a site for the imaginative negotiation of the gaps between family, school, workplace, between traditional standards of sexual behavior and modern dreams of romance and sexual expression, between freedom and anxiety. See Miriam Hansen, Babel and Babylon: Spectatorship in American Silent Film 118.
“universal hospitality,” where “[anyone] may be there” (170-171). The cinema is also a “school, salon, brothel, and bethel” providing “art, science, religion, philosophy, commerce, sport, adventure” through flashes of beauty of all sorts (171). In saying so, Richardson highlights the multiple, though apparently contradictory, functions the cinema is supposed to serve in her time. As venues of art, entertainment, education, and morality, the cinema is paradoxically conceived through Richardson’s comments.
Comments as such reveal also the cinema’s threshold status in terms of its breaking with the traditional domain of art and the bourgeois conception of the public sphere. Through comparing the cinema to a school, salon, and bethel as well as to its earlier stigmatized label “the brothel,” Richardson gives a twist of mass pleasure which traditionalists condemn. Richardson’s observation enables her to claim that cinema-going is an emerging urban activity inviting indiscriminatingly the masses, regardless of their sex, age, class, and taste of art. Of those sitting on the velvet seat may be “[happy] youth, happy childhood, weary women of all classes for whom at home there is no resting-place” (171). Or those elder spectators, “whose ears sound always the approaching footsteps of death,” are “free from the sense of moments ticked off” (171). Or those slum cinema-goers, “who are condemned, with no prospect of change to a living death, are lifted for a while into a sort of life as are said to be on the great festivals the souls in hell” (181). Or a charming girl, despairing of her first quarrel with the lover, may find that the cinema “as [a] refuge near her lodgings opens its twilit spaces and makes itself her weepery” (171). Or still even the intellectual, who “[sues] the cinema as a stupefier,” would nevertheless come to films for refreshment.
Admittedly, cinema-going is, for Richardson, an activity of social significance particularly to the urban masses. According to her, the film is a “social art, a show, something for collective seeing” and “a small ceremonial prepared for a group” like the urban spectators who otherwise find themselves isolated in their everyday experience (191). And cinema-going is an evening’s entertainment “providing hours of relaxation” and the trip to downtown cinemas “revives the unfailing bright sense of going out” and “lifts off the burden and heat of the day” (170). Thus, as well as indulging the visual pleasures in the dark, closed space, the urban cinema-goers enjoy visiting the cinema because in doing so they are able to free themselves from daily routines and walk off the marked boundaries of the family, school, and workplace.99 Celebrating particularly the pleasure of women’s cinema-going in the late 1920s London, Richardson indicates that cinema-going has become a trendy, plebeian activity linking up with the development of fashion, mass consumption, and public space:
Splendid. It’s the next best thing to a dance and sure to be good you can get a nice meal at a restaurant and decide while you’re there and if the one you choose is full up there’s another round the corner nothing to fix and worry about. And it’s all so nice nothing poky and those fine great entrance halls everything smart and just right and waiting there for friends you feel in society like anybody else if your hat’s all right and your things and my word the ready-mades are so cheap nowadays you
99 See Miriam Hansen, Babel and Babylon: Spectatorship in American Silent Film 115-18; de
Certeau’s theory on the walker’s practice of detouring or deviating from his/her everyday routes is also applicable to these mass pleasure-seekers negotiating their daily space. See Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life 91-110.
need never go so shabby and the commissionaires and all those smart people make you feel smart. It’s as good an evening as you can have and time for a nice bit of supper afterwards. (170 italics original)
These lines indicate also that instead of employing a top-down, male-dominated perspective on popular pleasures, as critics of mass culture do, Richardson, who identifies with the female viewing public, looks at the many pleasurable, positive effects of cinema-going on women cinema-goers conscious of their taking part in a wider urban space and a fashionable, respected form of pleasure.
In Richardson’s view, urban cinema-goers are the subject of spectatorship as well as that of mobility. Considering the younger generation to be more accustomed to modernized, urban distractions, Richardson asserts that “[u]ncertainty, noise, speed, movement, rapidity of external change that has taught them to realise that to-morrow will not be as to-day, all these factors have helped to make the younger generation shock-proof in a manner unthinkable to the majority of their forebears” (204). The newly urbanized generation’s much improved visual ability to deal with urban shocks is further linked by Richardson to the film spectator’s ability to contemplate the no less distracting spectacles on the screen. Richardson draws many analogies between the urban spectator and the film spectator capable of aesthetical contemplation, which is mediated by their similarly enchanted eyes. To begin with, for Richardson, the film spectator capable of contemplating filmic fantasies finds his/her counterpart in the urban spectator adapting to visual stimuli of all sorts and becoming aware of his/her taking part in commoditized, urban distractions. Rather than being distracted by the modern, commoditized spectacles, the film spectator, as well as the urban spectator,
learns to distance him/herself from “well-acted fantasies.” The film, in Richardson’s view, plays a vital role in technically and aesthetically mirroring the customary and restoring its essential quality so that the film spectator, emerging from his/her
“narcissistic” contemplation, becomes a disinterested observer, “through whose eyes what had grown too near and too familiar to be visible is seen with a ready-made detachment that restores its lost originality” (202).100
When accommodating to the visual stimuli, the film spectator, like the high-strung urban spectator, cultivates the attitude of blaséness, a self-defending mechanism developed to adjust to the constantly-renewed visual shocks. In his 1903 article “The Metropolis and Mental Life,” the German sociologist Georg Simmel famously addresses being blasé as typical of metropolitans needing to deal with shocks in an ever-changing ambience. According to him, the incapability to react to new stimulations with the required amount of energy constitutes “the blasé attitude which every child of a large city evinces” (329). And the blasé attitude is a particular adaptive phenomenon, in which “the nerves reveal their final possibility of adjusting to the content and form of metropolitan life by renouncing the response to them”
(330). While Simmel notices particularly the blasé attitude of the urban spectator, Walter Benjamin in his 1936 artwork essay explores the tactile, distracted
100 For Richardson, among the innumerable gifts bestowed by film-viewing, such is “the gift of quiet, of attention and concentration, of perspective” (205). For her, however, the soundless is a better catalyst for the making of a disinterested spectator. In her September 1930 article entitled “A Tear for Lycidas”
addressing the rise of “the Talkies,” Richardson argues against going to these speech films threatening to deprive spectators of their ability to contemplate. She laments over the wane of silent films, in which the soundless environment could enhance a contemplative distance between the seer and the seen better than the speech film. Indicating the precedence of the faculty of sight in the silent film, Richardson believes that silent films are more conducive to the detachment on the part of the spectator and that in giving a sufficient level of concentration on the part of the spectator, silent films allow “a sufficient rousing of his collaborating creative consciousness” (197).
spectatorship associated with the film spectator accommodating to filmic stimulations by apperception and habit. According to Benjamin, the spectator’s reception in a state of distraction “finds in the film its true means of exercise” and through putting the distracted viewing public in the position of the critic, “the film with its shock effect meets this mode of reception halfway” (“Work of Art” 240).
Both Benjamin’s conception of distracted filmic spectatorship and Simmel’s conception of blasé urban spectatorship are useful in approaching the fellow film spectators under Richardson’s observation, who are learning to suspend their visual response to the film’s shocks and adapt to those visual stimuli tactilely and
apperceptively. For Richardson, the distraction is much reduced by the spectator’s over-exposure to filmic fantasies, thus creating the possibility of his/her “critical”
viewing. Frequenting the late 1920s London’s cinemas, Richardson finds herself accompanied by many such blasé film audiences, who are particularly drawn to “the first rows.” Impressed by the audiences growing in “critical grace” and their “audible running commentary,” Richardson finds also that the quality of attention and
collaboration on the part of these audiences has changed accordingly:
. . . the front rows are no longer thrilled quite as they were in their earlier silent days by the hocus-pocus. They come level-headed and serenely talking through drama that a year ago would have held them dizzy and breathless. Even a novel situation does not too much disturb them. They attend, refused to be puzzled, watch for the working out. (173).
Through these lines Richardson highlights that the general viewing public, instead of being passive onlookers and mass consumers, manifest their power to judge and look
at the mass-produced fantasies critically, despite the fact that they might be “trained”
to do so by those same filmic fantasies originally dazzling them.
Another analogy Richardson draws between the urban spectator and the film spectator is that they are both capable of a cosmopolitan vision, exercised in the city’s and the film’s cosmic backdrops respectively. Owing to commercialization,
immigration, and the improvement in international transport, capital cities like London have since the late-nineteenth century turned into a site of cosmopolitan encounters. For different reasons, the “aliens” including the business-people, the travelers, and the immigrants walk side by side across urban space with the “native”
strollers, who are already a mixed breed as a consequence of urbanization. The city’s phantasmagoria is enhanced by these “alien spectacles.” Walking the streets, the urban spectator is thus a “man of the world” as well as a “man of the crowd.” Filmic
spectatorship, for Richardson, is also featured by a cosmopolitan vision as such.
Richardson believes that as a media of cultural communication, the film plays a powerful role in “the world-wide conversations,” entitling the spectator to “the insensibly learned awareness of alien people and alien ways” (186, 205). For the cinema-goers in rural districts, whose life is limited to the confines of a village or hamlet, the effect of the film’s cultivating an urban, cosmopolitan vision is even more obvious.101 For facing the screen, these rural cinema-goers “become for a while
101 While considering cinema to be essentially a form of urban pleasure, Richardson nevertheless examines its effect on cinema-goers in the rural district, “where life is lived all the year around in the open or between transparent walls, lived from birth too death in the white light of a publicity for which towns can offer no parallel” (185). Richardson maintains that the cinema may provide these rural cinema-goers “their only escape from ceaseless association, their only solitude, the solitude that is said to be possible only in cities” (185). Besides, highlighting that cinema-viewing could offer a
cosmopolitan vision, Richardson elaborates on the new, urban experience these rural viewers may have.
Through associating cinema-viewing with urban visual experience, Richardson thus reinforces her conception of cinema as being an urban pleasure for even the rural viewer.
citizens of a world whose every face is that of a stranger” and “the mere sight of these unknown people is refreshment” (185). They are “amplified,” “have a joyful
half-conscious preoccupation with this new world,” and “have no longer quite the local quality they had” (186).
As is demonstrated, cinema-going is an urban pleasure registering not only the
As is demonstrated, cinema-going is an urban pleasure registering not only the