‘A Distinct Advance in Society’: Early Cinema's ‘Proletarian Public Sphere’ and Isolated Spectatorship in the UK, 1911-18

Abstract

The conversational and interactive ‘picture theatre’ auditorium, a relative of the working-class music hall, the public house and the football stand, is frequently described in commentaries dating from its first years in the UK, between 1908 and c.1915. The predominantly working class audiences of these years appear to have regarded the new picture theatres as social venues, a locus for a form of public participation (see Hiley 1995: 163-4; Low 1948: 25-7). Rachael Low described the new purpose-converted and purpose-built picture theatres of the immediate pre-war period as ‘a new type of impersonal community centre’ (1948: 15). The relation of the new audiences to the screened image was conditioned both by these forms of working-class communal behaviour – the novelist and journalist Thomas Anstey Guthrie describing the working-class music hall in 1891 as ‘a cascade of whooping hobbardyhoydom’ (1891: 194) – and by habits of spectatorship derived from a range of public amusements including freak shows, circuses and magic shows. For Tom Gunning, the sensation of bewilderment at ‘a realm of impalpable phantoms’ (2000: 318) felt by the viewers of the ‘cinema of attractions’ (1895-c.1908) – a sense of magical wonder concentrated rather than diminished by cinema’s enhanced reality – relates to the treatment of optics inhering in practices of projection, animation and chemical image reproduction that had originated as early as the sixteenth century (Gunning 2000; see also Gunning 1988, 1990b, 1994, 1995). The magic lantern and the camera obscura had long been operated to provoke, and witnessed with, as much a sense of amazement as a sober appreciation of their