Alba Ferrer

Let us take a closer look at these passages portraying cinema audiences. The collective, or, more precisely, the enumerative, image of the cinemagoing public, while varying from author to author, never omits to mention the prostitute; usually she brings up the rear in the social groups represented. In his poem ‘A Living Photograph’ [Zhivaya fotografiya] Georgi Chulkov concludes a picture in verse of the social structure of the cinema audience with a ‘close-up’ of this figure:

Just look at the people bewitched by the scene: The lad from the shop with his mouth open wide, The corsetted lady fit to explode,

What lay behind this recurrent metonym: the prostitute in the cinema? In 1913 an article by S.Lyubosh appeared in The Cinematograph Herald where these ladies’ love of cinema was explained by the severity of the Petersburg winter:

After sauntering professionally for hours up and down the Nevsky or some other street it is so nice to be able to snatch a sandwich or a cake at Kvissisan’s and to sit in the warmth of a cinema and follow the extraordinarily moving story of an elegant Parisian cocotte or some jilted baroness.80

However, the circumstances of everyday life are hardly sufficient to explain the persistence of that repetitive image. It seems that the image stands for the cinema public as a whole rather than for just a part of it. The figure of the prostitute, by comparison with the other members of the audience, seems to express a higher collectivity; she represents, as it were, the image of the whole audience in the same way as this image stands for society as a whole. The semantics of the word ‘everyone’, which is central to the formula we are examining, fits equally the image of the audience and the image of the prostitute. This is why in some texts the list of characters is reduced to this metonymic minimum. Thus Alexander Kugel, describing a cinema performance in 1913, used only a single reference: ‘Beside me sat a young person with—I thought —slightly rouged cheeks. Probably some “priestess of love”. Her eyes were moist. She had brought her purifying sacrifice to the altar of cinema.’81

The image of the prostitute seems to be as immanently connected with film reception as that of Lumière’s train. As far as cinema in Russia is concerned, the figure of the ‘priestess of love with moist eyes’ is a part of its myth of origin. The point is that the way film was received in Russian culture differed somewhat from the way it was received in the country where it was invented. The Lumières’ first performances were set up as scientific demonstrations, but in Russia the public was introduced to cinema in rather disreputable circumstances. It is well known that the first large-scale acquaintance with cinema took place at Charles Aumont’s café-chantant on tour at the Nizhny Novgorod All-Russian Exhibition in 1896. Aumont’s Théâtre-concert Parisien was reputed to be a brothel. From the very beginning, cinema and prostitution were perceived, both by visitors to the café and by visitors to the first cinema performances, as being closely related. Russian literature was amazingly quick to pick up this perception. Two weeks after visiting the cinema performance at the Nizhny Novgorod Exhibition on 30 June or 1 July 1896, and after two reports in the local and Odessa press, Maxim Gorky published his short story ‘Revenge’ in no. 185 of the Nizhny Novgorod Newsletter on 7 July. The story featured the Lumières’ film, Baby’s Breakfast, and was based on two seemingly unconnected events, which occurred at about the same time and place. Two days after Gorky had seen the Lumières’ film at the exhibition, Lily d’ Artaud, one of the ‘chorus girls’ at the café, tried to commit suicide. From an article Gorky wrote before the Lily d’ Artaud incident, and which appeared in the Nizhny Novgorod Newsletter on 4 July, we learn that Aumont’s ‘show-girls’ were supposed to go in to the auditorium and watch the films together with the guests of the establishment. In this article Gorky touched on what was to be the basis of his story ‘Revenge’— the contrast between what was shown on the screen and the fate of those ‘victims of social mores’ among the girls of the café-chantant:

A young married couple and their bouncing baby are having breakfast. They are both so happy and the baby is so amusing; it creates a lovely, warm, impression. But isn’t this picture of domestic bliss out of place at Aumont’s? Another picture: happy, laughing, working girls are streaming out of the factory gates and into the street. This is also out of place. What is the point in reminding the people here that there can be such a thing as a decent, hard-working life? The very best it can do is to cause a stab of pain in the heart of a woman who sells her kisses for money. That’s all.82

It may be noted in passing that the journal The New Word, which posed these rhetorical questions in its provincial press section without mentioning Gorky’s name, offered its own explanation of why Aumont needed the cinema: ‘without it many respected guests at the exhibition might have found it distinctly awkward to pay a visit to Aumont’s.’83

In ‘Revenge’ Gorky—as if re-establishing the missing connection between the showing of the film and the suicide of Lily d’ Artaud—chose as his theme the spiritual drama of the prostitute who takes a new look at her life as a result of the impression the Lumières’ picture made on her:

‘I liked one picture in particular. It’s about a young couple, a husband and wife…they’re so, well, healthy and attractive, you know… They’re having breakfast and feeding the baby—such a sweet little thing! He’s eating and pulling faces… Oh, it’s so lovely! You can’t take your eyes off the picture, it’s so full of meaning… In this place, you know, well… it really makes you think.’ She stopped, lost for words, and drummed her fingers impatiently on the table. He noticed that her eyes had become somehow deeper, and clearer…. It aroused his curiosity.

‘Why do you like this picture in particular?’, he asked. ‘It’s family life!’, she exclaimed, ‘I am a woman, you know!’84

Metonymic in relation to the social composition of the audience, the image of the prostitute cinemagoer was not immune to a metaphorical reading. In 1917 one of the contributors to The Cinema Journal devoted a whole article to prostitution as a metaphor not just for the cinema audience but for cinema as an art form:

The spectator goes to the cinema with the same cynicism with which he goes to a prostitute. He knows that what he is about to see is just a pantomime, a comedy, nothing more than that. He knows that the prostitute’s caresses are no more than the studied gestures of a puppet; but still he goes to her, and he goes to her because he has to have this pantomime.85

The cheap luxury, the emotional repetitiveness, the sense of entering a perverse and criminal world, of being totally immersed in the life of the city, and finally the egalitarianism of the street—these are the qualities that turned the cinema and the brothel into another pair of ‘heterotopic siblings’.

As one reads in Miriam Hansen’s recent book on spectatorship in American silent film, cinema as prostitution appears among the international tropes of film reception (particularly prominent in early German discourse on cinema). This metaphorical association, according to Hansen, was a by-product of the rapid enlargement of the public sphere brought about by the new medium: ‘The cinema, as an art form that thrives at intimate commerce with the urban masses, promising happiness to everyone but faithful to no one, could only be troped as a prostitute.’86

Indeed, cinema was often seen as an enormous machine reworking the private into the public. A student song rhymed ‘Pathé’ and ‘décolleté’. This is what Alexander Kugel wrote in 1913: ‘There is something naked, something shamelessly physiological in the mere fact that cinema removes walls and shows “life as it is” in its minute details: in bedrooms, in drawing rooms.’87 _{This dictum shows that cinema would not}

have been forgiven even if all its films had been strictly decent, and all the prostitutes kept away from its audiences. It was not so much films or audiences as the very nature of cinematic discourse that predicated intrusion, immodesty and the violation of privacy.

‘GOING TO THE PICTURES’: THE EVERYDAY BEHAVIOUR OF THE CINEMAGOER

A key factor in the reception of early cinema was that it could offer a casual, i.e. impromptu, experience. Researchers have already discussed why Alexander Blok, from 1904 onwards, preferred the cinema: it was because one could go at a moment’s notice and select one’s film at random.88 _{Freedom from the usual ritual}

associated with visits to the theatre (evenings only, the bother of getting tickets, dressing up, the burden of socialising during the intervals) very soon became a recognised feature of the poetics of the cinema performance. The actor Konstantin Varlamov, joining those praising cinema as ‘the most democratic form of entertainment’,89 _{put it like this: ‘If, for instance, I am invited to the theatre, I think, “Can I really be}

bothered? I’ve got to dress up, put on a dinner jacket, collar and tie, studs and cuff-links. I’d rather go to the cinema, just as I am.”’90 _{The cinema proprietors took advantage of this and the programmes—even of large}

cinemas equipped with cloakrooms-noted that ‘Ladies are most respectfully requested to remove their hats; outer garments need not be removed’.91 _{Another important feature of the early stylistics of cinema}

performance was the rule which allowed ‘the public to come into the theatre at any time during the performance and to sit there as long as they liked’.92 _{This system did not last long in Russia—only until the}

programme ceased to consist of several separate short pictures. In Germany the tradition of the open performance lasted longer, and even in the mid-1920s one commentator, comparing the earliest cinemas with the changes that had taken place by his day, observed: ‘Only one custom has survived in cinema till today: everyone can come and go at any time, whether in the middle of the performance, at the beginning or at the end.’93 _{In America and Britain continuous performances lasted until well after the Second World}

War.

Continuous performance, however, had considerable importance for the way cinema was perceived. First, it gave the act of cinemagoing an aura of improvisation, of adventure, of illicit and abrupt departure from daily routine. In his diary Blok comments, ‘I was on my way to visit someone but ended up at the cinema.’ One could probably find many similar remarks in other diaries of the time. Second, the early viewer found himself in a specific situation vis-à-vis the object perceived. In the situation familiar to us, when the beginning of the film is synchronous with our appearance in the auditorium, we experience the film as an ‘object for us’. A psychological dependence is established between the text and its recipient. The film imperceptibly becomes the regulator of the viewer’s behaviour, compelling him to appear at the beginning and to leave at the end. The behaviour of the text and the behaviour of the recipient are mutually conditioned.

The casual continuous programme did not assume that the object and subject of perception were mutually determined. In the first place, unfixed entry into the auditorium redefined the concepts of the beginning and the end of the film. Nowadays coming late to a performance means that we get an incomplete impression of the film; just as leaving before the end of a performance lays the blame for incompleteness on the film itself. For visitors to the early cinema the situation was quite different: ‘You didn’t have to rush to catch the beginning of the film; the beginning was wherever you happened to come in.’94 _{In other words film}

performance was perceived as continuous self-propelled action. It was to be received, by definition, in fragmentary fashion and in doses determined by the recipient himself. It can be said that, although the full extent of the film was the same for the audience as a whole, each viewer set his own beginning and end.

The American author Stanley Cavell, on the basis of his own experience as a cinemagoer, describes the difference between the two modes of performance as follows:

When moviegoing was casual and we entered at no matter what point in the proceedings (during the news or short subject or somewhere in the feature—enjoying the recognition, later, of the return of the

exact moment at which one entered, and from then on feeling free to decide when to leave, or whether to see the familiar part through again), we took our fantasies and companions and anonymity inside and left with them intact. Now that there is an audience, a claim is made upon my privacy; so it matters to me that our responses to the film are not really shared.95

Furthermore, casual entry into the auditorium led to a minimum of interdependence between the film and the viewer. For anyone dropping casually into the cinema the film became one of those events one comes across by chance. The film appeared as ‘text in itself’ rather than as ‘text for me’, and its impromptu nature and autarchy placed it among the ranks of natural phenomena. For the Russian observer in the early twentieth century it was, first and foremost, the spontaneously developing element of the modern city. The Symbolist imagination welcomed the cinema exactly for this role as Andrei Bely’s article ‘The City’ [Gorod]96 _{or Maximilian Voloshin’s ‘Thoughts on the Theatre’}97 _{clearly show. Entering a cinema in the age}

of Symbolism, one comes into contact not with the film and not even with cinema but with the city, condensed into cinematographic text. For Blok this contact was in the nature of a game in which the choice of film, the choice of cinema and even the actual decision whether or not to go to the cinema, was not made by the individual but dictated by the dominating spontaneity of city life. A well-known passage in a letter to E.P.Ivanov in 1904 refers to this level of reception:

Yesterday I set off for your place. I suddenly saw that cinema on Liteinaya Street. I went in and watched the moving pictures for about an hour. I sensed a kind of symbolism in it all, but nevertheless I resolved to overcome all the obstacles lying in wait for me on my way to Nikolayevskaya Street. This is no joke. There is a kind of city mystery here…hidden ambushes… The thing to do is to trick yourself into slipping past them. Oh, the city….98

In Paris, where the culture of ‘flânerie’ was brought to a fine art, Jacques Vache in 1919 taught André Breton the proper way to go to the cinema. In order to achieve the maximum intensity of impression one should go into a cinema ‘whatever they are showing, at any point in the performance, and dash off to another one at the first sign of boredom…and so on ad infinitum’.99 _{Breton mastered this technique and was}

staggered by the effect of arbitrarily clashing images and actions. Richard Abel suggests that this was how Breton first experienced what he later called ‘the surreal’.100

By the beginning of the 1910s the poetics of the Russian cinema performance had begun to undergo a transformation—a development not unnoticed by the cinema press. Gradually, beginning with the city- centre cinemas, the mode of performance changed. In Russia, as everywhere else in Europe, the style of the performance came to reflect the nature of the repertoire. The fashion for full-length pictures did not of itself threaten casual entry to the cinema; programmes not only gave the contents of multi-reel films but also indicated what occurred in each reel. Things were more difficult with screen adaptations of best-selling novels. In these cases the linearity of reception was more firmly grounded in the audience’s expectations; the public had the right to demand a sequential repetition of the literary experience.

A key event in this process was the screen version of Henryk Sienkiewicz’s novel Quo Vadis? (dir. Enrico Guazzoni, Italy, 1912). The lavish scale of this production affected the distribution procedure and the style in which it was presented. In Berlin the Cines company opened a special cinema for the première of Quo Vadis?—Georges Sadoul claims that it was managed by the writer Hanns Ewers.101 _{There is an article}

by a writer who was present at the première. In it the author noted with surprise that the invitation ticket stated the time the film was to start and also requested that the audience should ‘appear in evening dress [Gesellschaftstoilette]’.102 _{The advance publicity put out by Russian cinemas showing Quo Vadis? noted}

the length of the performance (two-and-a-half hours with intervals between the parts), but did not say at what time it was due to start. Tension emerged between the custom of impromptu visits to the cinema and the tendency of the new repertoire to impose more rigid habits on the public. An open letter to film-makers from a group of cinema proprietors complained that pictures were becoming ‘unnaturally long’: ‘People who turn up after the performance has started are frequently obliged to wait an unusually long time for it to end; this is extremely tiring and naturally tends to put them off the cinema’.103

An attempt to smooth out this problem by creating something like a ‘sliding timetable’ of performances was made by the Petersburg Saturn cinema on Nevsky Avenue, which ran three adjacent auditoria. Here the publicity announcing Quo Vadis? carried a special announcement: ‘In order to spare the public the inconvenience of waiting, the picture will be shown in its entirety in two auditoria simultaneously.’104

The psychological climate surrounding ‘going to the cinema’ also changed. In 1912 Arkadi Bukhov attempted to portray the coarseness of the cinema public in an article in verse:

Fragments flying on the screen, Glass and plates in smithereens. In the darkness belly laughter,

High-pitched squeals and frenzied screams.105

But just three years later, in 1915, the same author finds signs of a new code of behaviour among the cinema public.

The kind of cinemagoer who chews seeds and guffaws at dramatic moments is already dying out. You