By the beginning of the First World War, according to one eyewitness, ‘the old, improvised, barn-like cinema theatres had almost disappeared from the centres of the two capitals. In their place there rose up huge cinema palaces, which were specially built for the screen and as carefully designed as if they could actually anticipate the public’s taste in such matters.’42
The distinction between the city-centre cinemas and those in the outer city areas also became a regulator of the repertoire. As early as 1907 the theatre critic Lyubov Gurevich drew attention to the difference between cinemas ‘intended for the intelligent classes’, and ‘the whole net of small cinemas serving the general public, which were scattered throughout the streets and alleys of the outer city districts’. According to Gurevich, the latter were ‘particularly interesting as far as their selection of pictures was concerned’. They showed sentimental melodramas and, generally speaking, ‘anything with a touching or moving content’.43 At the beginning of 1909 another observer, a reviewer for the newspaper Life writing under the
pen-name Flanyor [Flâneur], provided a more detailed picture of the specific repertoires of the central and outer city cinemas. Audiences outside the centre preferred ‘predominantly realistic films, whether dramatic or comic; they didn’t like anything to do with fairy tales, witches, magical transformations, etc.’. Newsreels, on the other hand, were widely shown. The cinema owners of the Zamoskvoretsky district, for example, just south of the river Moskva, ‘earned masses of money by showing pictures of the Moscow floods. Every viewer was flattered by seeing pictures of his own daily life (no matter how dull) on the screen.’44 The same author reported the details of the repertoires of the central Moscow luxury cinemas: ‘If
degree. The public enjoys the depiction of horrors, catastrophes, and of course anything even remotely to do with sex.’45
Neya Zorkaya has pointed out that passage in Maria Beketova’s memoirs where she describes Alexander Blok’s strolls around Petersburg:
Alexander Alexandrovich didn’t like smart luxury cinemas with their well-scrubbed clientèle He couldn’t stand places like the Parisiana or the Soleil for the same reasons that he hated Nevsky and Morskoi Avenues: they were full of that same class of well-fed bourgeois, gilded youth, prosperous engineers and aristocrats whom he detested and whom he called the ‘dregs of society’… He loved to get to some out-of-the-way place in the Petersburg district or English Avenue (not far from his flat), where the audience consisted of all sorts of people who were far from being either smart or well-fed— most of them were naively impressionable—and where he could surrender himself to the cinema with his own form of childish curiosity and delight.46
Such behaviour should certainly not be thought eccentric: among Russian intellectuals of the 1910s it was a matter of good taste to prefer the outer city districts to the centre. It was the reverse of snobbery: for Blok, going to films or attending circus wrestling meant getting oneself involved with what he believed to be the ‘real Russia’. Sharing the ‘naive’ unmediated reactions of working-class audiences to the equally unsophisticated stories they saw on the screen was Blok’s way of establishing contact with ‘the people’.
There was also movement in the opposite direction. The real, flesh and blood audiences of the outer city cinemas (as opposed to the idealised ‘folk audiences’ beloved of democratically minded intellectuals) were also attracted to the luxury film theatres of the city centre. We can reconstruct the social stratification of the internal space of the central theatres by studying the differentially priced seating layout (see 31–3): it is clear that the less well-off public did visit them. Most probably, the inhabitants of the outer city districts used to go to their local cinemas during the week, whereas the luxury theatres of Nevsky Avenue in St Petersburg, or Arbat Street in Moscow, served more for their Sunday evening entertainment. Shortly after 1917, when most social barriers collapsed, the central theatres were flooded by working-class cinemagoers. Ignatov observed this ‘class mingling’ in 1919:
It was easier to observe these groups when they took themselves to different establishments—the one to the fringes of town, the other to explore the enticing prospects of the centre—than when they come together and mingle in one establishment. This mingling has become particularly noticeable lately, and there can hardly be a single cinema where the ‘outer city’ people do not heavily outnumber the ‘central’ group.47
Still, for all the relativity of this division in terms of attendance, the opposition of periphery to centre was an important component of reception. This may be confirmed by considering the experience of the provinces; provincial cinemas were always situated in the centre of town. A 1914 article in a Moscow cinema magazine described a typical provincial scene:
On the main square, right opposite the town hall, a garland of fairy lights shines out around the façade of the Magic electric theatre. A dozen or so steps away, on the other side of the street, nestles the Express ‘theatre of illusions’. Around the corner of the next block we glimpse the suffused light from two large lanterns: this is the third cinema, the Empire. And finally, at the very end of the main street, where the bazaar begins, there is the Giant, in its own bright pool of light. This is a common sight in
any small provincial town. For a population of twenty-five or thirty thousand there are at least four electric theatres, which for some reason or other are all grouped close together on the one main street.48
Nevertheless, the opposition of centre and periphery, which was initially a feature of the two capital cities, was not long in appearing in the provincial cinemas of Russia, even in places which hardly deserved to be called towns. There only needed to be two cinemas—usually named after famous metropolitan theatres— for one of them to be regarded by the inhabitants as ‘central’, and the other as ‘outer’. Count Sergei Volkonsky, who in 1917 lived for a while in the Cossack village of Uryupino, later recalled:
When I asked my landlord (the village sexton) which cinema (or ‘illusion’, as it was called there) was the better, the Artistic or the Modern, he replied that they were both good, but that there was no comparison between the kind of people they attracted: ‘You just ought to see the people who go to the Artistic! It’s all bowler hats and feather boas, bowler hats and feather boas…’49