Picturegoers: A Critical Anthology of Eyewitness Experiences

By Adrian R. Lewis

This book is a carefully selected, thematically arranged collection of eyewitness accounts of seeing motion pictures – from the 1890s to the present day, and from countries across the globe. Included are essays, diaries, memoirs, travel accounts, oral history interviews, poems and extracts from novels. These verbatim accounts – from both professional and amateur writers – have been selected not only for what they tell us about the historical experience of cinema in many countries, but also for their literary value. Here is evocative testimony that shows how deeply cinema touches emotional needs, and the huge impact that the cinema has had on modern society.

While most film history studies are centred on films or those who produce them, Picturegoers puts the voices of the audience first. It analyses and celebrates the audience’s point of view, shaped by time, experience and place, providing a rich, entertaining portrait of a medium that became so transformative precisely because anyone, rich or poor, educated or not, could share in it.

The book will appeal to scholars interested in the relationship between cinema and society, those engaged in audience studies, and general readers interested in world cinema history.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Exeter Press
• Release date: Aug 30, 2022
• ISBN: 9781804130131

Adrian R. Lewis

Adrian R. Lewis is associate professor of history at the University of North Texas in Denton and a retired major in the U.S. Army.

Book preview

Picturegoers

Exeter Studies in Film History

Series Editors:

Richard Maltby, Matthew Flinders Distinguished Emeritus Professor of Screen Studies, Flinders University

Helen Hanson, Associate Professor in Film History at the University of Exeter and Academic Director of the Bill Douglas Cinema Museum

Joe Kember, Professor in Film Studies at the University of Exeter

Exeter Studies in Film History is devoted to publishing the best new scholarship on the cultural, technical and aesthetic history of cinema. The aims of the series are to reconsider established orthodoxies and to revise our understanding of cinema’s past by shedding light on neglected areas in film history.

Published by University of Exeter Press in association with the Bill Douglas Centre for the History of Cinema and Popular Culture, the series includes monographs and essay collections, translations of major works written in other languages, and reprinted editions of important texts in cinema history.

Previously published titles in the series are listed at the back of this volume

Picturegoers: A Critical Anthology of Eyewitness Experiences by Luke McKernan

First published in 2022 by

University of Exeter Press

Reed Hall, Streatham Drive

Exeter EX4 4QR

UK

www.exeterpress.co.uk

Picturegoers: A Critical Anthology of Eyewitness Experiences

© Luke McKernan 2022

The right of Luke McKernan to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

Exeter Studies in Film History

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

https://doi.org/10.47788/CEON9357

ISBN 978-1-80413-012-4 Hardback

ISBN 978-1-80413-013-1 ePub

ISBN 978-180413-014-8 PDF

Cover image: Afghan boy watching a Bollywood film at a cinema in Kabul, 2011 (Alamy)

Every effort has been made to trace copyright holders and obtain permission to reproduce the material included in this book. Please get in touch with any enquiries or information relating to an image or the rights holder.

To Emily and Rose

I went to the pictures tomorrow

I sat in the front near the back.

I fell from the pit to the gallery

And broke the front of my back.

The tickets were free if you paid at the door,

There were plenty of seats if you sat on the floor.

The band struck up and didn’t play

So I sat down and walked away.

British children’s playground rhyme, mid-twentieth century

Contents

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgements

Introduction

First Encounters

1Department of Physics

Anon.

2Magic Lantern Kinetoscope

Anon.

3Sporting Notions

Anon.

4Last Night I Was in the Kingdom of Shadows

Maxim Gorky

5My Life and My Films

Jean Renoirss

6Childhood Years

Junichiro Tanizaki

7Diaries of Joan Courthope

Joan Courthope

8Cinema in Iran

Mozaffar al-Din Shah Qajar

9The Movies in the Age of Innocence

Edward Wagenknecht

10 Kinema

Filson Young

11 The Classic Slum

Robert Roberts

12 The East End Years

Fermin Rocker

13 Magic Lantern

Ingmar Bergman

14 Flickerbook

Leila Berg

15 Magic Moments

John Sutherland

16 Live from the Met

John Wyver

Audiences

17 Sculpting in Time

Andrei Tarkovsky

18 Ben’s Limehouse

Ben Thomas

19 The Front Rows

Dorothy Richardson

20 The Nightside of Japan

Taizo Fujimoto

21 East Side Moving Picture Theatre—Sunday

Maxwell Bodenheim

22 Into China

Claude Roy

23 London Through Chinese Eyes

Min-Ch’ien T.Z. Tyau

24 A Woman’s Impression of the Philippines

Mary Helen Fee

25 The Log of a Noncombatant

Horace Green

26 The Lawless Roads

Graham Greene

27 Bioscope & Cinematograph Shows

George Jordan

28 Movie-Going as Resistant Community

Verónica Feliu

29 Il Cinematografo

Louis Couperus

30 Moslem Women Enter a New World

Ruth Frances Woodsmall

31 Indirect Journey

Harold Hobson

32 The Cinema

C.W. Kimmins

33 With the Silent Workers

Alexander L. Pach

34 A Cinema-Goer’s Autobiography

Italo Calvino

35 Russia of To-day

John Foster Fraser

36 Alexandra Palace Internment Camp in the First World War, 1914–1918

Rudolf Rocker

37 Germs

Richard Wollheim

38 The Heart of a Soldier

Lauchlan MacLean Watt

39 The Other Americans

Arthur Ruhl

40 Kiddar’s Luck

Jack Common

41 Words

Jean-Paul Sartre

42 Tell Me Grandpa

Josef Morrel

43 Things

Georges Perec

44 Family Life and Work Experience Before 1918

James Malone

45 The Spell of China

Archie Bell

46 The Magic Mountain

Thomas Mann

47 Going to the Cinema

Luke McKernan

Places

48 Dynamite in the Middle East

Khalil Totah

49 Red, Black, Blond and Olive

Edmund Wilson

50 A Holiday in Burma

C.M. Leicester

51 The Mexican Touch

Edwa Moser

52 An Island Night’s Entertainment

‘Inbad’

53 Swanson on Swanson

Gloria Swanson

54 As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning

Laurie Lee

55 Climbing the Mango Trees

Madhur Jaffrey

56 Astor-Harmonie

Frank Kessler

57 Working North from Patagonia

Harry A. Franck

58 Report from a Chinese Village

Li Hung-fu

59 The Crisis in Russia

Arthur Ransome

60 An Evening at the Cinema

Miss Johnson

61 In Order to Live

Park Yeon-mi

62 Journey to Tuva

Otto Mänchen-Helfen

63 Cocks and Bulls in Caracas

Olga Briceño

64 Going to Watch a Movie in 3021

Jacob Tann

Players

65 The Devil Finds Work

James Baldwin

66 London Particulars

C.H. Rolph

67 So Laugh a Little

Molly Picon

68 Journal 1929

Arnold Bennett

69 Bad Blood

Lorna Sage

70 Out of Place

Edward W. Said

71 Long Walk to Freedom

Nelson Mandela

72 Delight

J.B. Priestley

73 The Middle Passage

V.S. Naipaul

74 A Better Class of Person

John Osborne

75 Nights in Town

Thomas Burke

76 Sociology of Film

Anon.

77 Down Second Avenue

Es’kia Mphahlele

78 Movies and Conduct

‘Negro male student in High School. Age 17’

79 Asta Nielsen

Paul van Ostaijen

Reality

80 The World of Yesterday

Stefan Zweig

81 The Journals of Sydney Race

Sydney Race

82 Miracles of Life

J.G. Ballard

83 Modern Gladiators

Véra Tsaritsyn [Lady Colin Campbell]

84 The War Films

Henry Newbolt

85 The Cinema

Virginia Woolf

86 Flicks and This Fleeting Life

Tony Harrison

87 Diversions of a Naturalist

Ray Lankester

88 Gilbert Frankau’s Self-Portrait

Gilbert Frankau

89 Diaries

George Orwell

90 Total Recall

Arnold Schwarzenegger

91 Autobiography of a Yogi

Paramahansa Yogananda

92 Journal 1935–1944

Mihail Sebastian

93 Newsreels

Anon.

94 Twenty Minutes from Before the War

Joseph Roth

95 Shadow City

Taran N. Khan

Fears and Desires

96 The Diaries of Franz Kafka

Franz Kafka

97 Loitering with Intent

Peter O’Toole

98 Autobiographical Note

Vernon Scannell

99 Facts about Birth of a Nation Play at the Colonial

Mrs K.J. Bills

100 Why I Go to the Cinema

Elizabeth Bowen

101 Boyhood

J.M. Coetzee

102 The Way of a Transgressor

Negley Farson

103 Mornings in Mexico

D.H. Lawrence

104 Whose Laetie Are You?

Rrekgetsi Chimeloane

105 The Child and the Cinematograph Show

Canon H.D. Rawnsley

106 British Cinemas and their Audiences

‘Shorthand typist secretary, 21, female’

107 A Pound of Paper

John Baxter

108 My Memories of Star Wars Are Only True from a Certain Point of View

Paul Rose

109 The Legion of Decency

Mary J. Breen

110 Movies and Conduct

‘College girl of nineteen’

111 Scandinavians

Robert Ferguson

112 Babycham Night

Philip Norman

113 Leaving the Movie Theater

Roland Barthes

Coda

114 A Love Letter to Cinema

Frank Cottrell-Boyce

Bibliography

Index

Illustrations

1Illustration accompanying newspaper article ‘The Picture Palaces of London’, Daily Chronicle , 9 April 1910.

2A cinema during COVID-19 lockdown, Canterbury, UK, 2020. Photograph by Luke McKernan.

3Parlour exhibiting Edison Kinetoscope peepshow film viewers at 1155 Broadway, New York City, 1894.

4French poster designed by Marcellin Auzolle, advertising shows featuring the Lumière brothers’ Cinématographe projector, 1896. The film being watched is L’arroseur arrosé (France, 1895).

5W. Stocker Shaw, ‘In the Cinema’, British postcard c .1910.

6Vietnamese family at Vinpearl Land amusement park, Nha Trang, wearing glasses to watch a 4D film (3D film with physical effects), 2019. Photography by Chi Nguyen Thi Van.

7The Rex Theatre ‘for colored people only’, Leland, Missouri, USA, photographed by Dorothea Lange, 1939.

8German soldiers at a battlefield cinema on the Eastern Front during the First World War, 1916.

9Cinema Caffè Lanteri, Pisa, Italy, 2014. Photograph by Nicola Sap De Mitri.

10 Postcard of a movie screen in the sea at Wrightsville Beach, Wilmington, NC, USA, 1926.

11 Children outside a cinema at Belo sur Tsiribihina, Madagascar, 2008. Photograph by Marco Zanferrari.

12 Devriv, ‘With Friends at the Paradise Movie Theatre’, image taken from Second Life online virtual world, 2019.

13 Margaret Rutherford and Alastair Sim, stars of The Happiest Days of Your Life (UK, 1950), watching the film with an audience of children (many of whom were extras in the film).

14 Danish film star Asta Nielsen, 1910s.

15 People in occupied France queuing at a Paris cinema showing German newsreels, 1940.

16 Postcard advertising widescreen Cinerama shows in the USA, 1956. The film being shown is This is Cinema (USA, 1952).

17 Township audience in Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia) attending a screening of promotional films produced by the Tea Market Expansion Bureau, 1930s.

18 ‘At the Cinema: When Love is Crowned’, British postcard, c .1914.

19 ‘At the Cinema: The Tragic Film’, British postcard, c .1914.

20 Audience reactions at original British screening of science-fiction horror film Alien (USA, 1979).

21 Children in Hull cinema photographed using infrared photography, one of a series taken for a study into the effect of films on children, led by Mary Field (1951/52).

Picture sources

1 Nicholas Hiley 2 Luke McKernan 3 Public domain 4 Public domain 5 Nicholas Hiley 6 Dreamstime 7 Library of Congress 8 Alamy 9 Nicola Sap De Mitri, https://flic.kr/p/mmjGJo, CC BY-SA 2.0 10 UNC Libraries Commons, public domain 11 Marco Zanferrari, https://flic.kr/p/6juiWQ, CC BY-SA 2.0 12 Devriv, https://flic.kr/p/Qzk5Ki, CC BY-SA 2.0 13 Alamy 14 Danish Film Institute, public domain 15 Alamy 16 Steve Shook, https://flic.kr/p/7Fe6c9, CC BY-SA 2.0 17 Thelma Gutsche, The History and Social Significance of Motion Pictures in South Africa 1895–1940 (1972) 18 Luke McKernan 19 Nicholas Hiley 20 Alamy 21 Mary Field, Children and Films: A Study of Boys and Films in the Cinema (1954), by permission of the Carnegie United Kingdom Trust

Acknowledgements

I began collecting eyewitness accounts of cinemagoing in 2004. This was while working as Senior Research Fellow at the AHRB Centre for British Film and Television Studies, based at Birkbeck, University of London, on a project investigating the nature of the film business in London from 1894 to 1914. The project was led by Professor Ian Christie. My co-researcher Simon Brown studied the producers, distributors and ancillary businesses, while I took on exhibition and audiences, seeking out whatever testimony I could find on what the audiences themselves thought of this new medium. My thanks to both for helping to set me on this fruitful path of discovery.

The discoveries eventually led to a website, entitled Picturegoing (https://picturegoing.com), which reproduced many of the testimonies I had uncovered, not just from London but across the world. My grateful thanks to all those who have contributed ideas or otherwise helped support this research, including Ivo Blom, Mary J. Breen, Philip Carli, Albert Clack, Robert Clarke, Andrew Collins, Guido Convents, Beth Corzo-Duchardt, the late Karel Dibbets, Lucie Dutton, Ann Featherstone, Verónica Feliu, Adam Ganz, Dawid Glownia, Mo Heard, Stephen Herbert, Anne Jordan, Frank Kessler, Marja Kingma, Lily Middleton, Chris O’Rourke, Carol O’Sullivan, Fintan O’Toole, Paul Rose, the late Richard Rose, Deac Rossell, Jacob Tann, Maria Velez, Artemis Willis and John Wyver. My thanks must also go to those websites with open, digitized texts, notably HathiTrust, the Internet Archive, the Media History Digital Library, Papers Past, Project Gutenberg and Trove, which have opened up so many forgotten cinema-related texts for the obsessive researcher.

I am grateful to Frank Cottrell-Boyce for use of his ‘A Love Letter to Cinema’, which so poignantly captures so much of what the world missed about cinema during the COVID-19 pandemic, and to Rick Hodges for the version of the perennial playground rhyme ‘I Went to the Pictures Tomorrow’, as told to him by his late father, Edward R. Hodges.

Particular thanks are due to Nicholas Hiley for generous help in providing items from his personal collection, and for his support of the research in general.

My thanks go to Simon Baker, Anna Henderson and Nigel Massen of the University of Exeter Press, for having taken on an unusual publishing proposition with such keen interest.

The editor and publishers gratefully acknowledge permission to reproduce copyright material in this book as follows:

J.G. Ballard, ‘Miracles of Life’, by permission of HarperCollins UK; Roland Barthes, ‘Leaving the Movie Theater’, by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux; Elizabeth Bowen, ‘Why I Go to the Cinema’, by permission of Curtis Brown; Frank Cottrell-Boyce, ‘A Love Letter to Cinema’, by permission of RCW Literary Agency; Mary J. Breen, ‘The Legion of Decency’, by permission of Mary J. Breen; J.M. Coetzee, ‘Boyhood’, by permisson of David Higham Associates; Jack Common, ‘Kiddar’s Luck’, by permission of Bloodaxe Books; Louis Couperus, ‘Il Cinematografo’, English translation by permission of Ivo Blom; Joan Courthope, ‘Diaries of Joan Courthope’, by permission of East Sussex Brighton and Hove Record Office; Verónica Feliu, ‘Movie-Going as Resistant Community’, by permission of Verónica Feliu; Gilbert Frankau, ‘Gilbert Frankau’s Self Portrait’, by permission of Timothy d’Arch Smith; Tony Harrison, ‘Flicks and This Fleeting Life’, by permission of Faber & Faber; Harold Hobson, ‘Indirect Journey’, by permission of David Higham Associates; ‘Inbad’, ‘An Island Night’s Entertainment’, courtesy of Papers Past, National Library of New Zealand; Taran N. Khan, ‘Shadow City’, published by Chatto & Windus, copyright © Taran N. Khan 2019, reproduced by permission of The Random House Group Ltd and Aitken Alexander; Frank Kessler, ‘Astor-Harmonie’, by permission of Frank Kessler; James Malone, ‘Family Life and Work Experience Before 1918’, by permission of the UK Data Archive, under a CC BY 4.0 licence; John Osborne, ‘A Better Class of Person’, by permission of Gordon Dickerson and The Arvon Foundation; J.B. Priestley, ‘Delight’, by permission of Great Northern Books; Dorothy Richardson, ‘The Front Rows’, by permission of The Marsh Agency; Sydney Race, ‘The Journals of Sydney Race’, by permission of Ann Featherstone; C.H. Rolph, ‘London Particulars’, by permission of David Higham Associates; Paul Rose, ‘My Memories of Star Wars Are Only True from a Certain Point of View’, by permission of Paul Rose; Vernon Scannell, ‘Autobiographical Note’, by permission of Martin Reed; Mihail Sebastian, ‘Journal 1935–1944’, published by Pimlico, copyright © Edition Stocks 2001, reproduced by permission of The Random House Group Ltd and The Andrew Lownie Literary Agency; Jacob Tann, ‘Going to Watch a Movie in 3021’, by permission of Jacob Tann; Paul van Ostaijen, ‘Asta Nielsen’, English translation by permission of Fintan O’Toole; Richard Wollheim, ‘Germs’, by permission of Edwin Frank, NYRB Classics; John Wyver, ‘Live from the Met’, by permission of John Wyver; Stefan Zweig, ‘The World of Yesterday’, by permission of Pushkin Press.

Every effort has been made to trace and contact copyright holders prior to publication. If notified, the publisher will undertake to rectify any errors or omissions in any subsequent edition. Some short extracts from in-copyright texts have been reproduced under the fair dealing exception for quotation in UK copyright law.

Some of the historical texts reproduced in this book may use language or display attitudes that present-day readers could find objectionable. They are eyewitness accounts nonetheless and have been included as representative of their times.

Figure 1 Illustration accompanying newspaper article

‘The Picture Palaces of London’, Daily Chronicle, 9 April 1910.

Introduction

On 31 March 1900 the well-to-do Courthope family of Hawkhurst in Kent went on a visit to London. It was a fine, warm day. They watched steamers on the river, shopped, saw soldiers dressed in khaki uniforms. Lunch followed at the father’s rooms in Grosvenor Gardens. They then drove by cab to the new Hippodrome Theatre off Leicester Square. Thirteen-year-old Joan Courthope noted in her diary what they saw at the matinee performance.

It had begun & a man & a woman were walking on wire. Saw lots of things & then the lights were put out & we saw lots of lovely living pictures, we had never seen any before. They put up what each picture was going to be first. We saw the P of Wales reviewing the Imperial Yeomanry & then he got into a carriage & drove away. Saw Lord Roberts (Bobs arriving) & he got into a carriage with 3 other officers & drove away. Then we saw lots of troops going through Cape Town & all the horses were prancing & the shop girls ran out to see them pass. Then we saw ‘The Soldiers of the Queen’ Bobs, Bullar [sic] etc & then we saw French’s Horse having a Skirmish & it was lovely. Also an Armoured Train & every now & then a man[’s] head appeared over the side. At the last 2 pictures of the Queen were shown & the band played ‘God Save the Queen’. When the P of Wales was reviewing the I. Y. all the I. Y. took off their hats & waved their swords & gave 3 cheers. Then a good many other things done & at the end the who[le] arena turned into water & some people swam about & a lady took a dive 60 ft above the water. We saw a man with 21 Lions & lots of Dogs & Cats. Maggie had to go just before the end & Cousin Dora went with her to the station. When it was over ‘God save the Queen’ was played & Father, Mit, Barbara & I walked to Charing X about 3 min’s [sic] walk & had tea & then we came back. [7]

There are many accounts of the first film projections, mostly written by journalists and focusing on the technical aspects of this remarkable new medium, the motion picture. Examples from the viewpoint of the audience are not so common. Where they are occasionally mentioned in press reports it is as a mass, reacting generically.

Joan Courthope shows us the impact film had on the individual. The account of her first experience of film combines wonder with the matter-of-fact. It was both a remarkable and an ordinary thing to see figures from the Anglo-Boer War, then taking place in southern Africa, appear as in life on a screen in a London variety theatre. Her account gets across the excitement of witnessing the new phenomenon, but she takes it all in her stride at the same time, accommodating herself automatically to these disparate images of the famous but remote, the topic of every breakfast table conversation now on display at the Hippodrome. This acceptance and ready absorption of the new includes the experience of seeing the brief films amid wire-walkers, swimmers and a man with twenty-one lions. Film slipped in as part of the variety theatre programme. However, it would not be long before dedicated venues—or cinemas—for film would spring up, while many variety theatres found themselves increasingly including films as part of the show, or being converted to cinemas themselves. What started off as a diversion rapidly became a compulsion. We needed to see our world, whether in its real or imaginary form, on a screen.

This book is a record of that compulsion, as seen through the eyes of picturegoers from across the globe. It brings together eyewitness accounts of seeing motion pictures on a screen, from the 1890s to the present day. The idea of ‘eyewitness’ has been interpreted quite broadly. The accounts can be contemporary or recollections, non-fictional or fictional, published or unpublished. There are passages from newspapers, journals and magazines, from official reports, from memoirs, travel books, oral history interviews, blogs and other web texts, novels (where it is clear that the writer has borrowed from personal experience) and poetry—but not film reviews, which only tell us about the film. Each has been mediated in some way, so that one seldom encounters the original impression, either because it has been crafted retrospectively by the individual (memoir, fiction), or they are observed by others (travel writers, organizers of surveys, oral historians). The reader must be mindful of the form in which the testimony has been recorded, while valuing the voice above the process that has documented it. There are some notable names (Elizabeth Bowen, Italo Calvino, Graham Greene, George Orwell, Jean-Paul Sartre), several professional writers whose names are little-known now, and a number of ordinary people who have left a few words that express a truth, but not always a name. Each captures something haunting about the moving image; each rewards us with an individual voice.

The testimonies come from many lands and different time periods, with a bias towards the early decades of cinema. Partly this is because of availability, partly because so many of the sources have people looking back on their childhoods, but it is also true that in earlier years audiences noticed more of their surroundings. They have interesting things to say about the venues in which they find themselves, observations which enrich what is experienced on the screen. People still write today about the films they encounter, but too often the film is all that they see, as writers—professional and unprofessional—adopt the language of film criticism. Such testimonies lose all specificity; the film seen could have been experienced anywhere. It takes a change in the medium to provoke us into documenting where we are as much as what it is we are seeing. Television producer John Wyver’s blog post on seeing a theatre production streamed live into a cinema in 2007 triggers the same attentiveness to place and change that we see in accounts of the first film projections in the 1890s [16]. London student Jacob Tann’s account of going to the cinema in virtual reality transforms the familiar into the extraordinary [64].

The intentions in creating this anthology have been threefold. Firstly, it builds on a body of scholarly work from recent years that has taken a broadly sociological approach to cinema history. Looking beyond film chiefly as an art form, such work considers audiences, places, venues, prices, distribution models, comparisons with other forms of entertainment—all essential questions if we are to understand cinema not as an abstract concept but as a social reality. For many years the work of pioneering German scholar Emilie Altenloh, British film censor Audrey Field and American film historian Garth Jowett in considering cinema sociologically were anomalies.1 However, following the lead made by Robert C. Allen and Douglas Gomery in their Film History Theory and Practice (1985), such questions have been taken up enthusiastically by some scholars as the ‘New Cinema History’.2 By highlighting individual voices within their specific temporal, geographical and social conditions, this book stresses that cinema, as with any art form, must always be relative to its particular audience.

Following on from this, the second intention has been to stress the individuality of the cinema experience, contrary to the tendency of some studies to treat the people watching films as a homogenous mass. The individuality is there in character, age (if there are few children, there are many remembering their childhoods), gender, class, ethnicity, literary style and especially place. Cinema from its outset was an international medium, offering a roughly similar form of display across the world, while having huge differences in individual countries as audiences brought their culture with them when confronting the screen. Studies of picturegoing tend to focus on particular localities—the sociological method encourages this, by requiring measurable parameters—but it is salutary to look further and appreciate difference. To do so is to grasp why cinema became such a huge social as well as commercial success. It has been both international and local at the same time; a shared, but heterogenous experience, one that the multiplexes and digital distribution have undermined, but not completely, as yet.

Thirdly, the testimonies have been selected for their literary value. In attempting to translate the experience of going to the cinema, particularly when dealing with the new or the unexpected, the people featured have been pushed into eloquence, or are skilful writers in any case. They are recording the here-and-now, but they are also documenting dreams. The structure of the book has been inspired by some anthologies of poetry: organized thematically, the texts arranged to complement one another, the reader encouraged to sample individual pieces, numbering used for ease of reference.3

There are six thematic sections. These are not exclusive: several of the texts featured could have bene slotted into more than one section. However, those texts selected are there to illuminate each theme. First Encounters features accounts from people seeing motion pictures for the first time (it is the only section where the texts are ordered chronologically). The marvel of encountering film as something unknown inevitably occurs in texts from the 1890s, when films were first shown to the public. Some are dispassionate journalistic reports on a novelty, such as the anonymous Brooklyn Daily Eagle witnessing the first public exhibition of the Edison Kinetoscope peepshow viewer on 9 April 1893 [1]. Others document the thrill felt by individual audience members around the globe, from future novelist and screenwriter Junichiro Tanizaki in Japan, haunted by repeated shots of waves breaking on a shore [6], to Mozaffar al-Din Shah Qajar, Shah of Iran, seeing films on a giant screen in Paris and commanding his court photographer to bring back the technology to Tehran, ‘so God willing he can make some there and show them to our servants’ [8]. Maxim Gorky’s celebrated account of seeing a Lumière film show in Nizhny-Novgorod in 1896 (‘Last Night I Was in the Kingdom of Shadows’) analyses the ghostly figures on screen in a manner still profoundly resonant 125 years later [4].

Later accounts record the social phenomenon as much as the images on a screen. British journalist Filson Young, visiting a cinema for the first time in 1912, is alarmed at the appeal the medium has to an audience ‘of the lower middle classes, who looked as if they ought to have been at work’, expanding on the theme of apparent idleness that would be a regular cause of criticism from elites [10]. Robert Roberts, writing of his childhood years in Salford in The Classic Slum, gives us a very different view of the cinema, one which freed people in a social as much as an imaginative sense, when cinemas first came to the town:

For us in the village the world suddenly expanded. Many women who had lived in a kind of purdah since marriage (few respectable wives visited public houses) were to be noted now, escorted by their husbands, en route for the ‘pictures’, a strange sight indeed. [11]

Cinema was a liberating medium, its threat to the established order of things being what lay at the heart of the fears of those such as Young.

The second section, Audiences, features accounts of the crowd from the viewpoint of the individual. Sometimes the individual is an outsider observer; more often they are a member of the crowd itself. It is noticeable in such accounts how the personal pronoun can switch back and forth from ‘I’ to ‘we’, as the observer betrays themself as being both individual and part of a mass. The examples range from future theatre critic Harold Hobson, noting how the vaunted symbolism of D.W. Griffith’s Intolerance (USA, 1916) went completely over the heads of a Sheffield audience (but not the head of the twelve-year-old Hobson) [31]; to Ruth Frances Woodsmall, noting the liberating effect of cinema for women in some Muslim cities in the 1930s [30]; to Verónica Feliu on going to art cinemas as a home of free thought under the repressive Chilean military regime of the 1980s [28].

The texts can give a powerful sense of being there, recollecting experiences of going to the cinema that most of us would recognize, whatever time or place we have inhabited. Josef Morrell’s delightful account of being a child among a boisterous audience watching a serial in Fulham in the 1910s speaks of then but also of any time:

There was silence until the film got underway, then the piano gave the clues of the story. The pianist thumped the keys fortissimo when the hero was hurrying to rescue the heroine from all sorts of terrible fates, and we gave him every encouragement by raising our voices to a deafening pitch. It was when the leading lady’s baby was desperately ill, that the pianist gave her best.