Movies As Artifacts

The exact composition and nature of the first motion picture audiences has always been something of an historical mystery. While the classic histories of the movies all attempt to describe the initial devotees of the new entertainment, they are seldom able to go beyond a cursory analysis of the type found in Benjamin Hampton’s A History of the Movies (1931), where the author noted that, “A new class of amusement buyer sprang into existence as quickly and apparently as magically as screen pictures themselves appeared.” Only Lewis Jacobs in his seminal work, The Rise of the American Film (1939) goes into the kind of detail which is useful to film and social historians.

The question remains—who was this audience, and where did they come from? And why were they attracted to this new entertainment form in such vast numbers in such a short period of time? Only now are some of these answers beginning to appear, as film and social historians start to piece together the early years of the motion picture industry. It is becoming more and more obvious that the movies were no idle innovation, arriving at a propitious time, but that they answered a deep social and cultural need of the American people. The work in this area has just begun, and only by continuing such research can we hope to reconstruct the dimensions of the social impact of the motion picture on American society in the last seventy years.

A major aspect of the immense social and cultural changes taking place in America in the period after the Civil War was a growing interest and participation in new forms of recreation and entertainment. Eventually these new “mass” recreational forms would alter the pattern of American social and cultural life away from an emphasis on local interests and activities to a more national level of participation, with which we are so familiar today. The rapid influx of immigrants and rural Americans into the burgeoning urban centers provided the raw population base, but this alone did not account for the tremendous increase in newspaper and periodical literature readership. The circulation of daily newspapers increased 400 percent between 1870 and 1900, while the population grew only by 95 percent. This discrepancy is partly accounted for by the decrease in illiteracy and by a general raising of educational standards. The aggressive tactics of the publishers, who became much more expert in gauging the tastes of their readers, was also a major factor.