Early Cinema to Exploding Cinema.
Contemporary
mainstream cinema tends to be defined by its basis in a scripted drama and an
industrial mode of production. Its power is inevitably related to the way it
concentrates a massive amount of resources on the production of a sequence of
images.
On the other hand film and video production isn't
inherently expensive and films that are made outside of this commercial system
will often have a different form, content and aesthetics to the mainstream. The
huge capital investment into mainstream film inevitably guides the overall
content within the realm of its own interests, interests which are admittedly
dynamic, heterogeneous and in contention with each other. The apparent
diversity of the mainstream is all contained by a form which is based on the
entertainment of a passive and atomized audience.
In spite of the heterodox content, the general effect
of feature films inevitably protects the ideology of the financial backers.
Films made outside this system are able to articulate ideas, which are either
of no interest to the mainstream or are critical of the mainstream, in ways
that are not possible within that system. Not all ideas of relevance to the
human condition are commercial or entertaining. Most people would probably
agree that the interests of capital could never be entirely congruent with the
totality of human interests.[1]
It
is worth noting that the industrial mode of cinema did not appear
fully-fledged. The early days of cinema shared much in common with those areas
which are now outside the mainstream. Magic lantern shows preceded the
invention of film by three hundred years.[2]
It was popular in those places of entertainment without fixed seating that
preceded the purpose-built music halls of the latter Nineteenth century. The
sense of variety, the Master of Ceremonies, the magic lantern slide
projections, the drinking audience, the raucous atmosphere, even the occasional
technical chaos, seem to be reflected in a typical Exploding Cinema show.
Film had found a popular audience from its earliest
days in the late 1890s. Films were made by entertainers and showmen and shown
in empty shops, local halls, amusement arcades, itinerant peepshows, circuses
and particularly fairs and musichalls.[3]
In that
shuttered shop there was a miracle to be seen for a penny, but only twenty-four
could enter at a time; there wasn't room for more. (Low & Manvell 1973 p36)
The Empire Leicester Square was one of the first three music hall
venues to show films in 1896. After a while the fad for simple cinematic
illusion wore thin in the Music halls but stayed firmly established in the
fairgrounds.
Films
spread quickly through the fairs as they did through musichalls. They first
reached Hull Fair for example in October 1896, brought there by one of the
original fairground showmen of the cinema, Randall Williams. (Chanan 1996 p140)
At the peak of fairground popularity there were six cinemas at the
Goose Fair in Nottingham. It was the fairgrounds that bridged the gap to the
respectable picture palaces of the 1920s with their increasingly sophisticated
narrative product.[4]
As a low-art form of entertainment with a popular
audience, cinema had a set of aesthetic values somewhat at variance with those
of high art and more in line with those of other working class cultural
traditions. These were values that highlighted comedy, spectacle, improvisation
and spontaneity, a somewhat explicit sexuality, satire, 'irony in the face of
establishment homilies' and a general vulgarity.[5]
Pantomime
had given rise to a certain type of theatrical clowning which was later carried
to a very high level of perfection in the cinema by such artists as Chaplin,
while acrobatic clowning like Buster Keaton's evolved rather more from circus
traditions. (Chanan 1996 p130)
The Middle classes had, however, already realised the
power that cinema had to inculcate the values of respectability into the
working man and to 'rationalise' his entertainment.[6]
Calls
for the best writers often accompanied demands for the uplift of the industry.
The trade press urged the motion picture industry to legitimate itself by
producing scenarios penned by well-known writers of fiction and drama. In 1908,
for example, the New York Dramatic Mirror ran an article by a 'moving picture enthusiast' who strenuously
advocated 'a higher class of authorship in the construction of plots or
stories' as opposed to the 'crudest kind of drama' and 'the lowest kind of
slapstick comedy'. Which had hitherto dominated, stories produced by
higher-class authors would appeal to the 'more intelligent class of
spectators'. (Uricchio & Pearson 1993 p46)[7]
It was not until 1904 that the first purpose-built 'electric
palaces' made their appearance. Movies'
production and distribution rapidly expanded in the early 1910s.[8]
By 1925 the USA had nearly a thousand opulent 'picture palaces' - no longer
simple halls but buildings of spectacular opulence which rivaled the best
theatres. By this time the total cinema audience in the USA alone had reached
around 50 million a week with the industry increasingly centred on Hollywood.[9]
As a
form of popular mass entertainment, cinema-going did not generally find favour
among the middle class until the advent of sound systems heralded the era of
art deco picture palaces in the 1930's. (Gomes 1998)
The
inception of sound and the increasingly large sums of money to be made also
brought the mass-market film firmly under the control of the capitalist class.
They imported their own literary culture by way of the script and the
aesthetics of good taste. The Charlie Chaplin films of the 1920's can be seen
as a bridge to this period. His influences from working class culture and music
hall met a Hollywood system which had an ethos of respectability and taste, and
a literary heritage and articulation. Commercial cinema continued to evolve
through the 1930's and 1940s with an increasing reliance on scripted dramatic
narratives. The content was respectable and sentimental. The illusion of
narrative continuity was smooth. There was a sheen of perfection which created
an increasing gulf from the self-generated activity of artists and amateurs.
This dominance was maintained until there was a resurgence of the vulgar in the
form of B-Movie horror, rock and sex genres in the consumer explosion of the
1950's.
Through
the 1920s and 1930s, as the Hollywood Star/glamour system was evolving, there
was a lot of experimental activity in Europe, from the agit-prop cinema trains
of the Soviets to the abstract film experiments of artists, to the worker film
groups in England.[10] From the time of the Futurists, artists quickly saw
film as a new medium of experimentation. The inventiveness of this
experimentation supplied a stream of innovation to the commercial mainstream.
[1] This point is developed later in the terms of Jurgen
Habermas' Theory of Communicative Action.
[2] The early culture of film had arisen from a visual
culture, which included "chronophotography, panoramas and dioramas, slide
shows, bill boards and the instant snapshot." (A.L. Rees 1999 p21). A good
source on the culture of projection before film is 'The Magic Lantern's Wild
Years' by Mervyn Heard in Cinema: the beginnings and the future, edited by Christopher Williams (Westminster U.P.
London 1996). A comprehensive collection of information is Encyclopaedia of
the Magic Lantern, edited by David
Robinson et al (The Magic Lantern Society 2000).
[3] See Chanan (1996 p35)
[4] Exploding Cinema used a Circus Tent in Mountsfield
Park, Catford for a show on 8th July 1995.
[5] These are the values encompassed by the musichall and
the burlesque sideshows that were part of the travelling fairs. For the history
of music hall see Music Hall: performance and style, edited by J.S. Bratton (OUP 1986) and Music Hall:
the business of pleasure, edited by
Peter Bailey (OUP 1986). For a history of fairground see The English Fair by David Kerr Cameron (Sutton Publishing 1998) and for
the USA, Blue Ribbons and Burlesque: a book of country fairs, by Charles Fish (The Countryman Press, Woodstock,
Vermont 1998). For cinema at the fair see 'The Fairground Bioscope' by Vanessa
Toulmin in In the Kingdom of Shadows: a companion to early cinema, edited by Colin Harding and Simon Popple (Cygnus Arts
1996) and Life to those Shadows by
Noel Burch (BFI 1990).
[6] For details of the movements to provide 'rational'
entertainment and leisure activities for the new urban working class, see British
Socialists and the politics of Popular Culture 1884-1914 by Chris Waters (Manchester U.P. 1990)
[7] Uricchio and Pearson are quoting from the article
'Room for Improvement' from the New York Dramatic Mirror (22-8-1908 p9). For more on the effect of literary
culture on the movies, see Highbrow, Lowbrow: the emergence of cultural
hierarchy in America by Lawrence W.
Levine (Harvard 1988)
[8] Exploding Cinema had a show in the Rivoli Ballroom,
Brockley on 22nd December 1994. The Rivoli is an old barrel vault cinema in
South East London that was converted into a ballroom in the 1930's.
[9] Richard Maltby, Popular Culture in the 20th
Century (Grange Books 1994)
[10] Don Macpherson Traditions of Independence - British
cinema in the Thirties (BFI 1980)