Eyewitness accounts of viewing pictures
Source: Postcard, c.1909
Comment: Advertisement for the New Egyptian Hall and its Cinematograph Tea Rooms, from 1909. The New Egyptian Hall replaced an earlier Egyptian Hall in Piccadilly London, with a 123-seat cinema upstairs and tea room downstairs.
Source: Ann Featherstone (ed.), The Journals of Sydney Race 1892-1900: A Provincial View of Popular Entertainment (London: The Society for Theatre Research, 2007), p. 50
Text: February 1895
During this month Edison’s last greatest invention – the Kinetoscope showing living figures – has been on exhibition in a shop on the Long Row. The figures were contained in a big box and one looked down through a glass and saw them within.
I saw at different times a dancer and a barbers [sic] shop the latter with several figures and everything was true to life. The figures appear a brilliant white in outline on a black background but in the barber shop it was possible to distinguish a negro from the white man. The figures have been photographed continuously and two or three thousand of them are whirled before your eyes by Electricity in less than a minute.
Comment: Sydney Race (1875-1960) was the working-class son of a cotton mill engineer and worked as an insurance clerk in Nottingham. His private journal documents the different kinds of entertainment he witnessed in Nottingham. The Edison film he describes, Barber Shop (1893) (or its 1895 remake New Barber Shop), does not feature a black character.
Links:
Entry on Sydney Race at Who’s Who of Victorian Cinema
Source: C. Day Lewis, ‘Newsreel’, from Overtures to Death, and other poems (London: Jonathan Cape, 1938)
Text: Enter the dream house, brothers and sisters, leaving
Your debts asleep, your history at the door:
This is the home for heroes, and this loving
Darkness a fur you can afford.
Fish in their tank electrically heated
Nose without envy the glass wall: for them
Clerk, spy, nurse, killer, prince, the great and the defeated,
Move in a mute day dream.
Bathed in this common source, you gape incurious
At what your active hours have willed —
Sleep walking on that silver wall, the furious
Sick shapes and pregnant fancies of your world.
There is the mayor opening the oyster season:
A society wedding: the autumn hats look swell:
An old crocks’ race, and a politician
In fishing waders to prove that all is well.
Oh, look at the warplanes! Screaming hysteric treble
In the long power dive, like gannets they fall steep.
But what are they to trouble —
These silvery shadows to trouble your watery, womb-¬deep sleep?
See the big guns, rising, groping, erected
To plant death in your world’s soft womb.
Fire bud, smoke-¬blossom, iron seed projected —
Are these exotics? They will grow nearer home:
Grow nearer home — and out of the dream house stumbling
One night into a strangling air and the flung
Rags of children and thunder of stone niagaras tumbling,
You’ll know you slept too long.
Comment: Cecil Day-Lewis (1904-1972) was Poet Laureate, and father of the actor Daniel Day-Lewis. The poem’s subject is the audience’s response (or lack of it) to newsreels showing the Spanish Civil War.
Source: Min-Ch’ien T. Z. Tyau, London Through Chinese Eyes; or, My Seven and a Half Years in London (London: The Swarthmore Press, 1920), pp. 142-143
Text: If the music halls are popular, the cinema shows are perhaps even more popular. Not only are the prices of admission exceedingly low, but the performance itself is continuous from eleven or twelve in the morning to eleven or twelve in the evening. In a theatre or music hall the hours for the performance are definitely fixed; here the exhibition goes on uninterruptedly for twelve hours. When the pictures are finished, the series will commence all over again. Therefore, one can drop in at any time and, for a matter of sixpence or a shilling, enjoy the pictures for two or three hours. Moreover, there is also here all the freedom and unconventionality of a music hall; so one can smoke through the performance or come however dressed.
As in the stage, so in the cinema world, each has its admirers and heroes. But in the popular mind the cinema profession is perhaps more romantic. Not only are the lives of a cinema actor and actress more strenuous and exciting but the tricks of the cinema photographer make their adventures look most realistic and sensational. When we see a man fall from the top of a cliff or being burned to death, we know that the tragedy is faked and that he will soon appear again, safe and sound, in another part of the film. But for the moment our senses run riot, and we watch the result with bated breath and palpitating hearts. We half believe and half disbelieve, and we cry and laugh like children. Can a romance ask for more response?
Comment: This travel guide to London by a Chinese writer describes a visit to a London cinema in 1917. Min-Ch’ien T. Z. Tyau (1888-?) was a student in London during the First World War, during which time he set up a Chinese newspaper. On returning to China he became a noted writer on law and politics.
Source: ‘Female, 17, Negro, high-school senior’, quoted in Herbert Blumer, Movies and Conduct (New York: Macmillan, 1933), p. 146
Text: It seems to me that every picture picturing a Negro is just to ridicule the race. When a Negro man or woman is featured in a movie they are obliged to speak flat southern words, be superstitious, and afraid of ghosts and white men. They have to make themselves as ugly and dark as possible. The bad things are emphasized and the good characteristics left out. This is very unfair to the race. All Negroes are not alike; there are different types as in other races. Why must they be portrayed as ignorant, superstitious animals instead of decent people that are just as capable of doing great things as any other race; all they need is the chance. It is the same with other dark races besides the Negro. They are always the loser, the shrinking coward, and never the victor. It is very unjust of the white race to make every nation appear inferior compared to them.
Comment: American sociologist Herbert Blumer’s Movies and Conduct presents twelve studies of the influence of motion pictures upon the young, made by the Committee on Educational Research of the Payne Fund, at the request of the National Committee for the Study of Social Values in Motion Pictures. The study solicited autobiographical essays, mostly from undergraduate students of the University of Chicago, and presented extracts from this evidence in the text. Most of the evidence relates to picturegoing in the 1920s. The interview extract is given in the chapter ‘Schemes of Life’ under the section ‘Stereotyped views’.
Links: Copy on Internet Archive