Cinema

Cinema as the mass culture art form that we know today began with technological advances in French photography by Joseph Nicéphore Niépce in 1827 and Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre in 1837. By 1895, Auguste and Louis Lumière screened their first moving pictures. These silent moving pictures were usually accompanied by a live musical performance and quickly became popular but nonetheless minor attractions that were added to vaudeville shows; vaudeville being, at the time, the dominant theatrical medium.

With the onset of World War I, many Europeans fled the fighting in Europe to make a new life in the United States. These European immigrants brought cinema with them, and soon penny theater venues known as nickelodeons appeared throughout America. Unlike vaudeville shows, which treated cinema as a passing novelty or fashion, nickelodeons were a concerted effort that gave cinema the main stage for public consumption. According to Patrick Mullins, nickelodeons attracted regular crowds, were cheap to attend, and formed an important aspect of the social lives of the people displaced by World War I. However, nickelodeons were also known to be fire hazards due to the extremely flammable film stock used in the projectors. This, coupled with the basic seating and crowded atmosphere, soon made nickelodeons as famous for their regular emergencies as for their popularization of cinema. Some nickelodeons sought to exude a grandiose aura with their interiors, but all faced the dangers of the highly flammable film stock.

Prior to nickelodeons, films were usually short clips of single scenes of either fiction or nonfiction, which suited the format of the traveling vaudeville shows. With the permanent premises and regular audiences [Page 163]established by nickelodeons, films began to become lengthier. The Pathé Frères Company was the first to experiment with longer narratives. Following this French lead, the Edison Manufacturing Company, an American company, started to manufacture longer films also. Longer films favored the producers of the films, as they could charge higher prices for exhibition. By 1910, almost a quarter of New York City was attending cinema screenings in nickelodeons on a weekly basis. Numbering between 1.2 and 1.6 million people, this regular and sizable audience provided the basic economic conditions for cinema to become a mass-culture phenomenon; to cater to this large demand, the studio system was invented.

Although sound was included in films in the early 1920s, it was not until Radio-Keith-Orpheum (RKO) Pictures released the first “talkies” in 1929 that consumption of major feature films became de rigueur. Western Electric (later AT&T), after buying Lee de Forest's Phonofilm invention, improved on sound technology. Subsequent developments by the Vitaphone Corporation, which acquired the AT&T Phonofilm technology, made sound a viable aspect of cinema. Vitaphone approached Warner Brothers with its improved technology, and in 1927, Warner Brothers produced one of the first films with synchronized sound, The Jazz Singer. Several other films from other studios offered synchronized soundtracks in this period as well, including Columbia's My Wife's Gone Away in 1928. Sound provided an impetus for cinema as a phenomenon of mass culture and mass consumption.

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