PICTURE PALACES LECTURE THIS WEEK WE’RE GOING TO

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Picture Palaces – Film History Lecture—Exhibition

Picture Palaces Lecture


This week, we’re going to think about the nature of movie-going in the age of the picture palace. In doing so, we are going to consider questions and source materials of particular interest to historians of film exhibition. Before we start, let’s think what we mean by exhibition history. What kinds of questions does it ask and what might a focus on exhibition tell us about film history?


Here are some questions to get us started.


In groups (5 minutes)

How would you describe the nature and conditions of movie-going today and how might this be seen to compare with earlier periods of film history?


Ina Rae Hark, in her edited collection, Exhibition: The Film Reader, states that: “When we speak of film exhibition, we are describing all the practices that come together at a given time and place to enable viewers to watch a film.” Exhibition is important because, as Hark reminds us, it is traditionally the site where the money comes in and is therefore pivotal to the economics of Hollywood. As an area of historical film studies, however, the study of exhibition can take on many forms; it can include the study of “business practices, architecture, local history and urban geography, the marketing of films and the meaning of the movie-going experience.”


Today’s lecture will look at the example of the Picture Palace, a kind of exhibition practice which flourished from the teens to the 1930s. Critically, I want us to think about the picture palace as a historical phenomenon and begin to consider its social, economic and cultural significance.


Brief reminder of film exhibition

Before we look at Movie Palaces, we should remind ourselves very quickly of the contours of film exhibition since the development of a workable cinematic apparatus in the 1890s. We have covered some of this ground before, of course, but let’s recap to situate the picture palace in its historical place.





Movie palaces

With this context in mind, we can turn to the development, rise and social significance of what was known as the picture palace during the period from mid teens to the 1930s, peaking in the 1920s when the ornate, opulent, grand picture palace dominated motion picture exhibition and arguably transformed the movie going experience as fundamentally as had the emergence the nickelodeon before.


As you will know from this week’s reading, these spaces were characterized by:


  1. Grand design often with an exotic name and decorative motifs including Egyptian, Chinese, baroque, renaissance, and classical elements built into every facet structure and creating an impression of awesome grandeur and exoticism.


  1. Features included enormous lobbys, huge and opulent bathrooms, on-site nurses and nurserys for kids, with sandboxes and toys and free child minding, armies of uniformed staff, and very significantly, air conditioning.


  1. Very grand auditoria seating thousands of patrons, with painted ceilings, plasterwork details, heavy drapery and opulent textures and colours in upholstery fittings, furniture etc.


  1. The program included, depending on whether you were in one of the flagship Picture Palaces or in an outlying one, a stage show, a newsreel, trailers on coming attractions, a comedy short subject, and the feature, with features being changed much more frequently than they are today. With movie going becoming a social phenomenon so much greater a part of people’s lives than today, there was a huge demand for product, and the Hollywood production line was cranked up to produce far more films than are produced these days.



Consider Roxy Rothfal’s description of just one element of his NYC picture palace


People want primarily to feel that it is their theatre…One cannot overemphasize the importance of “atmosphere”…Fresh flowers are placed daily in the lobbies and promenades of the theatre, on which one item alone are spent several thousands dollars a year…By creating this atmosphere, and making the patron feel he is our special guest and that nothing for his comfort and convenience has been overlooked, we have won the first battle; after this, everything is much easier.”


Samuel L. “Roxy” Rothafel, proprietor of the 6214-seat Roxy Theatre, New York, in Architectural Forum, June 1925.



King for a Day (democratisation of goods)


In one sense, the rise of the picture palace was linked to the growth of the middle-class, and the selling of movies to this class. But more than this, we can link the development of the movie palace to broader transformation of early 20th century America.


To think about this, we might ask what connection the movie palace has to the development of the department store?

Are there any connections we can make between these two seemingly different kinds of phenomena or space?


Well, these two apparently entirely different phenomena can be seen as manifestations of similar and related transformations in American culture. Douglas Gomery notes how the business practices of the film exhibitor began to copy the scientific management of the retail chain store, chiefly through taking advantage of economies of scale, but also through the manufacture of exciting and pleasurable environments related to the act of consumption itself.


Exhibition practices prior to the 1950s trained audiences to seek pleasure in the experience of film consumption rather than to rank the desirability of consuming any single narrative on a film by film basis.” (Hark) Why? How was this achieved?


In both the movie palace and the department store we find that:


In short, both “shopping” and “movie-going” emerged as leisure pursuit in their own right at more or less the same time. It is worth pointing out that prior to the emergence of the department store, people went to shops to buy things and not to just look around. Echoing the movie palace, department stores were defined by their own grand spaces, opulent furnishings, chandeliers and so on – they were spectacles of consumption and encouraged particular kinds of social interaction that bore similarity and comparison with the movie palace.


1) Both encouraged particular styles and conventions of behaviour. Shoppers didn’t have to confront shop-owners in the department store and there was a respectful distance created between the experience of being a patron, much like how the movie palaces’s enforced retrained manners quietened down and civilized the perhaps more unruly and certainly louder nickelodeon audience. In this sense, both spaces provide modes of social interaction which were both communal and private (or more so than they had been)


2) They both democratised public space – created spaces where people of various classes and backgrounds, were placed in a proximity which was hitherto highly unlikely or impossible.

Both provided a large-scale and fairly posh domestic environment which were a safe haven for women (for example) to meet in public in relative style and security.


It is worth noting that the period which coincided with the expansion of department stores and movies palaces was one in which a measurable increase in national wealth appeared in the US. Between 1880 and 1930 the number of salaried employees increased 8 fold, coming to compose over 60 percent of the middle class. Soon, white collar ranks became the largest single group in the labour force. Between 1897-1930, per capita annual income increased from 231-719 dollars. Household expenditures tripled between 1909 and 1929.


What is being charted here is the simultaneous expansion of the economy and of available wealth, leisure time, and the development of what has come to be known as the ‘Consumer Society.’ Hollywood and the department store are both good historical examples of these societal transformations.

In both places, exoticism, opulence and the masses converged into spaces where leisure and consumer desire provided both, on the one hand, a relative democratisation of public space, as I said, and on the other, powerful examples of the emergence of mass culture and consumer culture in 20th century America.


In watching Safety Last, we might think of its particular representation of the department store and consumer culture as this was also the culture to which motion picture theatre belonged in the 1920s.


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