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EARLY MOVIE-GOING IN NIAGARA From Itinerant Shows to Local Institutions, 1896–1910 PAUL S. MOORE INTRODUCTION In August 1910, a moving picture named Scenes in Ontario was advertised playing at the Princess Theatre in Niagara Falls, Ontario. The film was part of a Canadian-themed bill, one of three different programs to appear at the Princess that week. At the time, just as movie-going was becoming an everyday routine and a local institution in Niagara Falls and across North America , each short film was presented almost interchangeably. Individual pictures were not yet advertised as having special interest, let alone presented as having local interest for particular audiences in Niagara or anywhere else. Not yet nicknamed “movies,” films came and went in constant variety. In just this week at the Princess, twelve pictures were shown, interspersed with a variety of illustrated songs, musical selections, and short plays on stage. The films included comedies, melodramas, westerns, and scenic or newsworthy pictures from around the world.1 The picture of Ontario scenes was nothing special. Compared to more popular genres and more exotic locations, the movie-going public of Niagara Falls was probably disappointed to see the selection. After the first show, however, the Niagara Falls Record excitedly reported that this particular film had “created quite a little comment last night,” because it was “a local picture which shows scenes along the Niagara , St. Catharines and Toronto Railway from Port Dalhousie to Falls View.”2 Indeed, the Princess changed its advertising to elaborate: “Scenes in Ontario, including N., St. C. & T. Ry, Falls View to Lake Ontario.” Even more 69 70 Movies and Media remarkably, this film stayed for an extra two days “by special request,” even when the other films on the program changed. While the definitive debut and origins of cinema are debatable, the novelty became publicly exhibited worldwide in 1896, and in every present-day Canadian province and most Canadian towns by the end of 1897. From the very first months of commercial cinema, people in towns and cities around the world marvelled at images of Niagara Falls from afar. Yet the earliest exhibitions of moving pictures in the Niagara Region itself in 1896 and 1897 notably failed to include those scenes of Niagara’s famous waterfalls. If cinema specialized in showing the world, beyond local experience, its global, mass culture was nonetheless built upon gatherings of local audiences. By 1910, moving picture theatres had become anchored local institutions, each connecting people to modernity through the world on screen. In that context, with a film of a tram ride through St. Catharines and Thorold to the city of Niagara Falls, and only then to the site of the Falls themselves, the people of Niagara clamoured to appreciate their own region on screen as part of the modern world, knowing audiences elsewhere were seeing the same film. Moving pictures of Niagara’s waterfalls were the first images of Canada filmed and are central to any history of early Canadian cinema. The same cannot be said of movie-going in Niagara. Film distribution and exhibition in the Niagara Region (Welland and Lincoln counties) was organized commercially as a marginal part of a Toronto-based mass market, itself a marginal affiliate of a global industry soon dominated by the United States. Niagara’s theatres and audiences are absent from the record of Canada’s film history, but hardly more than any other region because local sites are altogether sidelined as a result of the global reach of film production, distribution, and exhibition. Niagara’s local relation with mass culture can thus be taken as paradigmatic for Canada as a whole—an international flow of popular culture easily crossed the Canada–United States border at Niagara; the region received magazines and newspapers, touring shows and circuses, and later radio and television broadcasts directly from south of the border. The people of Niagara could also casually cross the border in person, and in many ways their metropolis was Buffalo, not Toronto. My argument is that, if images of the natural wonder of the Falls themselves stand in for the entirety of early Canadian cinema, then the cultural experience of modernity that grew from the Falls can be understood as a condensed version of the Canadian experience of American popular culture. On the one hand, this historical case study of the beginnings of movie-going in Niagara is valuable as an example of the more general, even globalized, emergence of mass culture. On the other hand...

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