Picturegoers

Luke McKernan

Description

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 here 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 for their literary value. It is evocative testimony that shows how deeply cinema touches emotional needs, and the huge impact that the cinema has had on modern society.

One-hundred and fourteen carefully selected excerpts are organized thematically into six evocatively-titled sections: ‘First Encounters’, ‘Audiences’, ‘Places’, ‘Players’, ‘Reality’, and ‘Fears and Desires’. We find a host of everyday voices responding to cinema – Rudolf Rocker, anarchist; Li Hung-fu, Chinese villager; James Malone, wrestler; George Jordan, policeman; ‘Negro male student in High School, age 17’. Amongst these are interspersed the insights of more familiar names – Virginia Woolf, Stefan Zweig, George Orwell, J.M. Coetzee, Arnold Bennett, Elizabeth Bowen, J.B. Priestley, John Osborne, J.G. Ballard, D.H. Lawrence, Roland Barthes and Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Twenty-one images complement the text by illustrating different ways in which films have been viewed, from battlefield cinemas to infrared studies of child audiences, from Madagascar to Vietnam, from Cinerama to virtual reality.

While most film history studies put films or those who produce them first, 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.

Frank Cottrell-Boyce’s piece A Love Letter to Cinema, written for BBC Radio 4's Today programme (May 2021), and broadcast just as cinema emerged from lockdown, provides a fitting coda to the book - affirming the importance of cinema as a collective cultural experience.

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.

Contents

 

Acknowledgements

List of Illustrations

 

Introduction

First Encounters

1. Anon., ‘Department of Physics’


2. Anon., ‘Magic Lantern Kinetoscope’


3. Anon., ‘Sporting Notions’


4. Maxim Gorky, ‘Last Night I Was in the Kingdom of Shadows’


5. Jean Renoir, ‘My Life and My Films’


6. Junichiro Tanizaki, ‘Childhood Years’


7. Joan Courthope, ‘Diaries of Joan Courthope’


8. Mozaffar al-Din Shah Qajar, ‘Cinema in Iran’


9. Edward Wagenknecht, ‘The Movies in the Age of Innocence’


10. Filson Young, ‘Kinema’


11. Robert Roberts, ‘The Classic Slum’


12. Fermin Rocker, ‘The East End Years’


13. Ingmar Bergman, ‘Magic Lantern’


14. Leila Berg, ‘Flickerbook’


15. John Sutherland, ‘Magic Moments’


16. John Wyver, ‘Live from the Met’

 

Audiences

17. Andrei Tarkovsky, ‘Sculpting in Time’


18. Ben Thomas, ‘Ben’s Limehouse’


19. Dorothy Richardson, ‘The Front Rows’


20. Taizo Fujimoto, ‘The Nightside of Japan’


21. Maxwell Bodenheim, ‘East Side Moving Picture Theatre—Sunday’


22. Claude Roy, ‘Into China’


23. Min-Ch’ien T.Z. Tyau, ‘London Through Chinese Eyes’


24. Mary Helen Fee, ‘A Woman’s Impression of the Philippines’


25. Horace Green, ‘The Log of a Noncombatant’


26. Graham Greene, ‘The Lawless Roads’


27. George Jordan, ‘Bioscope & Cinematograph Shows’


28. Verónica Feliu, ‘Movie-Going as Resistant Community’


29. Louis Couperus, ‘Il Cinematografo’


30. Ruth Frances Woodsmall, ‘Moslem Women Enter a New World’


31. Harold Hobson, ‘Indirect Journey’


32. C.W. Kimmins, ‘The Cinema’


33. Alexander L. Pach, ‘With the Silent Workers’


34. Italo Calvino, ‘A Cinema-Goer’s Autobiography’


35. John Foster Fraser, ‘Russia of To-day’


36. Rudolf Rocker, ‘Alexandra Palace Internment Camp in the First World War, 1914–1918’


37. Richard Wollheim, ‘Germs’


38. Lauchlan MacLean Watt, ‘The Heart of a Soldier’


39. Arthur Ruhl, ‘The Other Americans’


40. Jack Common, ‘Kiddar’s Luck’


41. Jean-Paul Sartre, ‘Words’


42. Josef Morrell, ‘Tell Me Grandpa’


43. Georges Perec, ‘Things’


44. James Malone, ‘Family Life and Work Experience Before 1918’


45. Archie Bell, ‘The Spell of China’


46. Thomas Mann, ‘The Magic Mountain’


47. Luke McKernan, ‘Going to the Cinema’

 

Places

48. Khalil Totah, ‘Dynamite in the Middle East’


49. Edmund Wilson, ‘Red, Black, Blond and Olive’


50. C.M. Leicester, ‘A Holiday in Burma’


51. Edwa Moser, ‘The Mexican Touch’


52. ‘Inbad’, ‘An Island Night’s Entertainment’


53. Gloria Swanson, ‘Swanson on Swanson’


54. Laurie Lee, ‘As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning’


55. Madhur Jaffrey, ‘Climbing the Mango Trees’


56. Frank Kessler, ‘Astor-Harmonie’


57. Harry A. Franck, ‘Working North from Patagonia’


58. Li Hung-fu, ‘Report from a Chinese Village’


59. Arthur Ransome, ‘The Crisis in Russia’


60. Miss Johnson, ‘An Evening at the Cinema’


61. Park Yeon-mi, ‘In Order to Live’


62. Otto Mänchen-Helfen, ‘Journey to Tuva’


63. Olga Briceño, ‘Cocks and Bulls in Caracas’


64. Jacob Tann, ‘Going to Watch a Movie in 3021’

 

Players

65. James Baldwin, ‘The Devil Finds Work’


66. C.H. Rolph, ‘London Particulars’


67. Molly Picon, ‘So Laugh a Little’


68. Arnold Bennett, ‘Journal 1929’


69. Lorna Sage, ‘Bad Blood’


70. Edward W. Said, ‘Out of Place’


71. Nelson Mandela, ‘Long Walk to Freedom’


72. J.B. Priestley, ‘Delight’


73. V.S. Naipaul, ‘The Middle Passage’


74. John Osborne, ‘A Better Class of Person’


75. Thomas Burke, ‘Nights in Town’


76. Anon., ‘Sociology of Film’


77. Es’kia Mphahlele, ‘Down Second Avenue’


78. ‘Negro male student in High School. Age 17’, ‘Movies and Conduct’


79. Paul van Ostaijen, ‘Asta Nielsen’

 

Reality

80. Stefan Zweig, ‘The World of Yesterday’


81. Sydney Race, ‘The Journals of Sydney Race’


82. J.G. Ballard, ‘Miracles of Life’


83. Véra Tsaritsyn [Lady Colin Campbell], ‘Modern Gladiators’


84. Henry Newbolt, ‘The War Films’


85. Virginia Woolf, ‘The Cinema’


86. Tony Harrison, ‘Flicks and This Fleeting Life’


87. Ray Lankester, ‘Diversions of a Naturalist’


88. Gilbert Frankau, ‘Gilbert Frankau’s Self Portrait’


89. George Orwell, ‘Diaries’


90. Arnold Schwarzenegger, ‘Total Recall’


91. Paramahansa Yogananda, ‘Autobiography of a Yogi’


92. Mihail Sebastian, ‘Journal 1935–1944’


93. Anon., ‘Newsreels’


94. Joseph Roth, ‘Twenty Minutes from Before the War’


95. Taran N. Khan, ‘Shadow City’

 

Fears and Desires

96. Franz Kafka, ‘The Diaries of Franz Kafka’


97. Peter O’Toole, ‘Loitering with Intent’


98. Vernon Scannell, ‘Autobiographical Note’


99. Mrs K.J. Bills, ‘Facts about Birth of a Nation Play at the Colonial’


100. Elizabeth Bowen, ‘Why I Go to the Cinema’


101. J.M. Coetzee, ‘Boyhood’


102. Negley Farson, ‘The Way of a Transgressor’


103. D.H. Lawrence, ‘Mornings in Mexico’


104. Rrekgetsi Chimeloane, ‘Whose Laetie Are You?’


105. Canon H.D. Rawnsley, ‘The Child and the Cinematograph Show’


106. ‘Shorthand typist secretary, 21, female’, ‘British Cinemas and their Audiences’


107. John Baxter, ‘A Pound of Paper’


108. Paul Rose, ‘My Memories of Star Wars Are Only True from a Certain Point of View’


109. Mary J. Breen, ‘The Legion of Decency’


110. ‘College girl of nineteen’, ‘Movies and Conduct’


111. Robert Ferguson, ‘Scandinavians’


112. Philip Norman, ‘Babycham Night’


113. Roland Barthes, ‘Leaving the Movie Theater’

 

Coda

114. Frank Cottrell-Boyce, ‘A Love Letter to Cinema’

 

Bibliography

Index

Sujets

• Social History
• 20th Century
• Social Science
• Popular Culture
• Modern
• HISTORY
• Sociologie, société et politique
• Película fotográfica
• 21st century
• Modern history
• General officer
• History of film
• General
• Obermodern-Zutzendorf
• Film

Informations

• Publié par: University of Exeter Press
• Date de parution: 30 août 2022
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781804130131
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

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

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
1 Department of Physics
Anon.
2 Magic Lantern Kinetoscope
Anon.
3 Sporting Notions
Anon.
4 Last Night I Was in the Kingdom of Shadows
Maxim Gorky
5 My Life and My Films
Jean Renoirss
6 Childhood Years
Junichiro Tanizaki
7 Diaries of Joan Courthope
Joan Courthope
8 Cinema in Iran
Mozaffar al-Din Shah Qajar
9 The 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
1 Illustration accompanying newspaper article ‘The Picture Palaces of London’, Daily Chronicle , 9 April 1910.
2 A cinema during COVID-19 lockdown, Canterbury, UK, 2020. Photograph by Luke McKernan.
3 Parlour exhibiting Edison Kinetoscope peepshow film viewers at 1155 Broadway, New York City, 1894.
4 French poster designed by Marcellin Auzolle, advertising shows featuring the Lumière brothers’ Cinématographe projector, 1896. The film being watched is L’arroseur arrosé (France, 1895).
5 W. Stocker Shaw, ‘In the Cinema’, British postcard c .1910.
6 Vietnamese 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.
7 The Rex Theatre ‘for colored people only’, Leland, Missouri, USA, photographed by Dorothea Lange, 1939.
8 German soldiers at a battlefield cinema on the Eastern Front during the First World War, 1916.
9 Cinema 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).
P