Jasper Redfern's No. 1 Vaudeville Company: Regional exhibition practice in transition

Abstract

While the history of early filmmaking and exhibition in Yorkshire has previously drawn only limited critical attention, the materials of the Fred Holmes Collection now offers us new insight into the region through the practices of Jasper Redfern. Drawing on both this newly uncovered collection, the materials of the National Media Museum, as well as on a series of business records held by the National Archives, this article presents an investigation of Redfern's unsteady progress through the changing market of film production and performance in the region. Starting as a demonstrator of the Kineoptikon, Redfern established himself as a localized showman who was able to tailor his show to high-profile music hall shows, as well to private performances for various social events. From this he developed his own ‘complete' touring programme of mixed live and screened entertainments, and ‘Jasper Redfern's No. 1 Vaudeville Company' broke into more permanent forms of exhibition, eventually forming a network of venues across England. Despite the initial success of this cine-variety format, Redfern's decline in the face of cinema's rapid expansion prior to 1910 shows the market's wider transition from favouring localized speciality towards prioritizing a more standardized and constantly renewed form of film exhibition.