Films at the Fairs: Cinema at the San Francisco and San Diego International Expositions of 1915

Abstract

The influence of World’s Fairs on the development and dissemination of the visual culture of the United States has long been studied by historians and art historians, but the way motion pictures figured into these celebrations of nation, progress, and technology is less well understood. This article surveys cinema’s function as a conduit for visual education, a technology for immersive entertainment, an instrument of social control, and a mode of advertisement in two fairs staged in 1915, the Panama Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco and the Panama-California Exposition in San Diego. In its early studio-as-amusement-park and proto-museological initiatives, what I call Hollywood’s “industrial historiography” took root at those fairs in ways that would reverberate throughout the silent period and indeed continue to structure the way Hollywood thinks about itself to the present day.