Cinema and Society in the British Empire, 1895-1940

James Burns

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781137308023
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: History

By 1940 going to the movies was the most popular form of public leisure in Britain's empire. This book explores the social and cultural impact of the movies in colonial societies in the early cinema age.

1

The Birth of the Cinema Age

Thus does a seat at the picture show open up to us the wonders of the deep and the adventures of earth and heaven.

Washington Post, 20 August 1909¹

Moving pictures appeared in the major cities of the British Empire in the late 19^th century, at the same moment that they were being introduced in Europe and North America. Over the first two decades of the 20^th century the medium spread from the large urban centers of the West Indies, India, Southern Africa, and British Malaya into provincial towns and villages. By the end of the First World War ‘going to the pictures’ had become a fixture of public leisure for hundreds of thousands of imperial subjects, who were seeing movies in a wide array of urban and rural venues.

This chapter surveys the first quarter century of the cinema-age in the British Empire. It begins by charting the early spread of moving pictures into the empire’s colonies, protectorates and dominions. It continues on to provide a series of thumb-nail sketches of cinema-going in those areas of the empire which had the greatest exposure to the medium by 1918. These potted histories explore the economics of the moving picture business, the social composition of audiences, and early attempts to regulate screen images and segregate audiences. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the shared experiences of these early imperial audiences, as well as an analysis of several anomalies that characterized the early story of the cinema in some areas.

A comparative study of the first generation of the cinema illuminates several trends that will be of interest to the historian of the empire. First, the movies introduced a new form of public leisure into imperial cities that integrated virtually all social classes. Indeed, cinema was among the first common cultural experience to be shared by the peoples of the empire. On the screen colonial peoples on four continents caught their first glimpses of the Royal Family, saw the great metropolises of Europe, and experienced an idiosyncratic version of world history as reconstructed on American movie lots. And they saw these images while seated next to peoples of disparate religious, ethnic, and class identities. Thus it is worth recognizing the role of the movies in presenting the peoples of the empire with an unprecedented shared cultural experience.

Such a study also illuminates the role of the cinema in shifting imperial culture away from Great Britain towards the United States. As will be demonstrated, the initiative for this process lay with colonial entrepreneurs who came to dominate the cinema trade. The business of showing movies was a novel commercial activity that was embraced and popularized by local businessmen who were often part of a marginalized caste or class, perceived as apart from both the ‘whites’ and ‘natives’ of colonial society. This role was fulfilled by Parsi entrepreneurs in India, Chinese merchants in British Malaya, and Jewish businessmen in South Africa and the Caribbean. The influence of these minority entrepreneurs would shape the distinctive trajectory of colonial film exhibition. Their commercial connections often ran laterally across colonial borders, rather than through London. By 1918 they were reaching out to neighboring colonies, and across the seas to America to acquire new films and forge commercial relationships.

The cinema’s influence on the majority of people living in the empire during the first two decades of the age was limited. When one considers the numbers seeing movies in the United Kingdom by 1914, the attendance figures in the most populous regions of the empire appear miniscule. But it would be a mistake to assume that its influence was insignificant. It was during these initial decades that the future contours of its growth and development were laid out, and the basic pattern of cinema consumption became established. Though few realized it at the time, movies were on their way to becoming the premiere form of public entertainment throughout the empire. They would remain a vital source of information and entertainment until its dissolution.

The early cinema age coincided with a remarkable burst of urbanization throughout the British Empire, as new metropolises sprang up, and ancient cities doubled and tripled their populations. These cities were highly diverse, drawing together ethnically, racially, religiously, and linguistically disparate communities into plural societies. Emerging in a culturally fluid environment, the new movie houses raised vexing questions about public access. Because they provided an inexpensive and popular form of entertainment, cinemas increasingly came to rely on the poorer elements of colonial society. But in many regions of the empire white elites sought to prevent colonized peoples from sharing the social spaces of the cinema houses. Thus in the first two decades of the century the cinema would find itself at the center of segregation conflicts, as elites sought to restrict access to the new entertainment venues.

Cinema’s images were also less easily monitored by authorities than the previous forms of entertainment that had been imported from the West. To be sure, officials had in the past deemed certain programs inappropriate for colonial audiences.² But performances by traveling entertainment troupes, for example, were relatively easily controlled, and their exhibition was limited by sheer geography. Colonial administrators grew to fear the potentially corrosive effect of movie images on their authority. Thus the censorship of films, and the policing of audiences, was widely believed to pose a unique challenge to colonial rule.

This chapter also provides a framework for evaluating broader historiographical questions about film, empire, and modernity. Many film scholars relate the emergence of the cinema to the birth of modernity,³ while historians of the empire have defended it as a powerful instrument of modernization.⁴ Yet little is known about the extent of the cinema’s spread or influence within the empire. To understand what role, if any, the cinema played in the modernizing impulse of imperialism, one must first understand who went to the movies, what films they saw, and in what context. By providing answers to these questions, this chapter permits an informed discussion of the role of the early cinema as an agent of imperial modernization.

The study of the early history of the cinema in the empire is fraught with challenges. To begin with, the sources are scarce and scattered. This is especially true with respect to the social history of the experience. Audiences were transitory communities whose voices seldom appeared in public records. They might periodically draw attention to themselves during a crisis, such as a fire in a theater – which were common – or when the appearance of a particularly controversial film led to public scrutiny of their tastes and behavior. But for the most part spectators’ activities went unnoticed. Because of the paucity of sources, historians have assumed that the experiences of early audiences were largely unrecoverable, and thus few have made any effort to study them. The scholarship that has been done on early film audiences is almost entirely confined to local studies in Europe and North America.⁵ Scholars of world cinema for their part have expressed little interest in the colonial era. Most studies of film history in regions of the former British Empire focus on the development of the local industry after independence. If they pay any attention to the colonial era, it is to briefly recognize the work of a few pioneering film-makers. Finally, scholars of all stripes have recognized that evaluating the influence of the cinema on individuals or communities is difficult. Thus, most historians interested in the social and cultural history of imperial territories have ignored the growth of cinema-going because its contours were unknown, and its influence unquantifiable.

The cinema age began with a demonstration in Paris in 1895. From there the technology traveled throughout the cities of Western Europe and to the Eastern seaboard of North America. In its early years it was integrated into the existing live performances (such as magic shows and vaudeville acts) which were the staple form of leisure in the urban areas of the Western world. It emerged as a form of entertainment in its own right after 1904 when entrepreneurs began establishing parlors where customers could watch a series of short films. By 1908 there were approximately 10,000 nickelodeons in America alone, mostly in urban areas. By 1910 movie attendance in America averaged twenty-six million customers a week, and by 1914 cinema owners in the United Kingdom were averaging 364 million paid admissions per year.⁶

The economics of the early cinema encouraged its rapid dissemination. Film was a commodity that, once produced, could be duplicated and resold almost endlessly. Unlike the forms of entertainment it competed with, such as musical theater and vaudeville, it required no rehearsal, props or paid talent. As a contemporary article in the Washington Post put it, ‘it is a theatrical entertainment in itself without the heavy cost of the theatre’.⁷ Moving pictures were particularly attractive to theater managers in remote places who were always looking for ways to fill the gaps in their schedules between the visits of itinerant performers. It was a cash business that an entrepreneur could start by purchasing an inexpensive projector and renting films. In the tropical regions of Britain’s empire most people would experience their first cinema show under the stars in an open theater, meaning entrepreneurs did not even need to hire a hall. Thus it required relatively little capital to run. For audiences used to attending live public entertainments which often included brief cinema screenings, the transition to becoming consumers of the cinema by itself was relatively seamless.

In the first decade of the movies most screenings consisted of a series of short films with virtually no narrative structure. Among the most popular were news scenes, particularly those with a military theme, such as British soldiers campaigning in South Africa, or images of the Russo-Japanese War. At one of the earliest documented shows in the empire, audiences in Bulawayo, Rhodesia in 1896 were treated to brief clips of ‘scenes from the Hispano-American War … nautical pictures – Marines landing and attacking enemy, retreating to their ships … and the S.S. Scott leaving Cape Town’.⁸ European royalty was a popular fixture of shows worldwide. Scenes of Queen Victoria’s Jubilee in 1897, and her funeral three years later, were screened widely throughout the empire. This type of subject matter was partially determined by the technical capabilities of the era – the bulky size of early cameras limited film-makers’ ability to capture any but staged scenes, or scheduled events such as a procession or the arrival of a ship. Watching a narrative film was most often like watching a play at a theater, as the performances had been captured by a stationary camera with no change of focus. It was not long, however, before great innovators such as Georges Méliès and Edwin Porter emerged who pushed the limits of the technology and, along the way, developed the language of film. Porter’s The Great Train Robbery (1903) in particular was a path-breaking short that popularized a new narrative technique which would revolutionize audience expectations. Soon, understanding the meaning of different types of shots and editing techniques became second nature to audiences, so that by 1908 the cinema was established as a popular form of narrative entertainment in its own right.

The evolving status of the cinema is vividly reflected in the early experience of the medium in Jamaica. When the first pictures were screened in the city of Kingston on November 1, 1897 they were advertised in the newspaper simply as a great novelty, with no explanation as to what audiences could expect. When a visiting moving picture show returned to the island three years later it could still advertise its ‘bioscope’ technology as ‘the wonder of the age’.⁹ But promoters now felt compelled to provide a description of the show, promising an array of films, including a short comedy film (‘chicken thieves get shot’) a live sensational film (‘stable on fire’) a travel film (‘the black diamond express’) and scenes from the Boer War.¹⁰ Audiences were already jaded enough to require the promise of new, specific sensations to draw them to the theater – rather than the mere wonderment of seeing pictures move. Still at this stage, however, the films were being advertised as a part of a variety program which featured other forms of entertainment ‘too numerable to mention’.¹¹ Over the next several years the movies visited the island irregularly. By 1904 when a traveling group called the Ireland Brothers returned to Jamaica, the focus in their publicity was squarely on the films they presented, without reference to any other elements of the show. A local newspaper, The Gleaner took pains to emphasize that the program would be far superior to what audiences had come to expect after their previous visit in 1902. The newspaper said that since their last trip they had traveled throughout North American cities, and the major ports of the Caribbean, giving shows and acquiring new films. In America they had acquired films of the St. Louis World’s Fair ‘so that the people of Kingston may share the great World’s Fair brought to them and enjoy a trip about the grounds the same as those who paid hundreds of dollars to go there’. The advertisement also promised ‘moving pictures of the Japan...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Series Editors’ Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 The Birth of the Cinema Age
• 2 Silents in the Empire
• 3 Uplifting the Empire: Colonial Cinema and the Educational Film-Movement, 1913–1940
• 4 The Era of the Talkies
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index